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HK ALHAMBRA 



MEDITEERANEAN 
IDYLS 

AS TOLD BY THE BELLS 
MERRYDELLE HOYT 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 

/ tell the tale as 'tv:as told to me 

By the tongue of a hell on the shores of the Sea. 




RICHARD G. BADGER, PUBLISHER 
THE GORHAM PRESS, BOSTON, U.S.A. 



Copyright, 1913, by Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 

T)9T3 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



©CI.AS58787 



CONTENTS 

First Idyl page 

RINGING THROUGH SPAIN ..... 9 

As Told by a Bell 

Second Idyl 

AMONG THE LOTUS BLOSSOMS .... 37 

As Told by a Pillow 

Third Idyl 

IN THE LAND OF JACOB'S WELL ... 71 

As Told by a Bottle of Water 

Fourth Idyl 
IN THE SILENCES OF NORTH AFRICA . 107 

As Told by Another Bell 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Alhambra Frontispiece 



FACING 
PAGE 



Street in Seville 16 

Segovia, "Like a Full-Masted Ship about to Sail" . 28 

The Colossi of Memnon 42 

Old Memphis ^^ 

Queen Nefertari Playing Chess Three Thousand 

Years Ago ^^ 

Columns in the Temple of Philae 68 

The Holy Sepulchre 80 

The River Jordan . 90 

View from Athens at Sunset 104 

Street in Tunis 110 

In Chetma. The Venice of the Desert . . . .114 

Old Roman Ruins at Timgad 118 

Native Street in Constantinople 122 

Street in Bon Saada . 126 

El Kantara, the Gatevray of the Desert . . . .130 
Street of the Dancing Girls in Biskra . . . .136 
A Kabyle Tent . 142 



MEDITERRANEAN IDYLS 




FIRST IDYL 



RINGING THROUGH SPAIN 

AS TOLD BY A BELL 




MEDITERRANEAN IDYLS 



RINGING THROUGH SPAIN 

AM so very old that my past is 
wrapped in a thick veil of myth and 
tradition, but I think I must be 
Spanish, for I am never without a 
fan and mantilla. Although a cen- 
tury or two has passed over my head, 
I am still called beautiful, and rank 
as a bell. But alas, my once beautiful voice is 
silenced forever, owing to the lack of a tongue, 
and I am now spending my days and nights 
perched on the top of the radiator of an auto- 
mobile. Just at present I am on my home- 
ward voyage from Spain and my memories of 
that great JMediterranean Peninsula are most 
vivid. 

It is dark down here in the hold of the ship, 
but the sound of the lapping of the waves of 
the Mediterranean Sea makes me think and 
dream of the adventures just completed. 

11 



Mediterranean Idyls 



It is said that when one sense is lacking, the 
others take its place and become more acute, 
so now my eyes and ears must make up for the 
lack of a tongue. I certainly would have 
needed them all, if I had continued racing 
through the country at such a breakneck speed. 
It was a glorious life however, and while I was 
back in my native Spain, I tried to see and hear 
all that I could. Perhaps when we return to 
our home in America, my mistress will lend me 
a tongue from one of her numerous bells, for 
she possesses a goodly number, so that I may 
tell her all I have seen and heard en route. 
She herself always wears a tiny gold bell sus- 
pended from her neck, picked up long ago in 
Rome, and as the automobile rushes along, its 
wee tongue tinkles to me about what has hap- 
pened when we are apart. You can see it 
hanging on the initial letter of this story. 

The hardest thing to me in this mode of 
traveling was staying so much in garages — 
you see I have always been accustomed to sit 
quietly in elegant houses, amid luxurious sur- 
roundings, so this garage Ufe was an entirely 
new experience. 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Luckily my longest stay was in Madrid, in 
an up-to-date garage. My people were 
afraid to risk my precious neck on the bad 
roads, so they went down to Granada by rail. 
In Madrid I had a stall to myself; it was lots 
of fun watching the chauffeurs, who were all 
Spanish "play bull." They would take one 
of my lap robes, and shake it, and pretend that 
they were ferocious bulls — even the children 
(chicos as they call them in Spain) would play 
bull in front of our automobile on the road, 
coming very close and pretending it was a 
terrible monster which they had to dodge at 
the last moment.* It used to scare me dread- 
fully, for sometimes it seemed as if we would 
certainly run over them. The chauffeurs 
themselves had a real bull fight the day we 
arrived in Madrid, picadors, matadors and 
bandarillos, all were chauffeurs, and they 
fought in the regular bull ring (Plaza de 
Toros) just like the ordinary bull fighters. 

Sitting in the garage, watching and listen- 
ing to all this talk and play made me listen 
with great interest to the story a huge bell 
which my mistress brought back from Seville 

13 



Mediterranean Idyls 



with her, had to tell. She found it in a street 
rag fair, and I thought "how are the mighty 
fallen" when it told of its untimely end after 
such a romantic life. An ugly bell it was with 
a big heavy wooden handle sticldng out of the 
side, and yet it had a nice voice, as clear toned 
as an Alpine cow bell. But this voice, alas, 
was as the voice of the Lorelei, its only purpose 
being to lure to destruction! In the darkness 
of the night, the great manly bull, whose whole 
existence had heretofore been spent in the in- 
nocent Elysian fields of Spain would hear its 
dulcet tones exactly like the voice of his lady- 
love calling from afar, and would come pranc- 
ing after it for miles, not dreaming that it was 
only a bell carried in the hands of a horseman 
who was thus luring him to his death in the 
bull ring. 

Almost all the fighting bulls in Spain are 
pastured near Seville. In the dead of night, 
on the eve of a fight, they are thus lured into 
the city, never more to come out alive, for it 
is the law of the land that no bull shall fight 
more than once — if he fight well and success- 
fully, he must be butchered outside. I used to 

14 



Mediterranean Idyls 



pity the poor things whenever I passed one in 
the automobile, and if I had had a tongue, I 
should have whispered a word of warning. 
My mistress visited the house of the widowed 
lady-love of Espartero, one of Spain's greatest 
bull fighters, or toreos as they are called, and 
there she saw beautiful paintings of these 
happy fields. A toreo always has a nickname 
— -w^hat the real name of Espartero is, I do not 
know, but Espartero means mat-maker. The 
contrast between a humble mat-maker and a 
fiery toreo is certainly funny. Bombita was 
the name of another in Seville, and that means 
little bomb. They tell a story of his having 
fallen in love with a beautiful lady who was 
married, and the little girl born to them never 
knew that her father was the famous bull 
fighter, the idol of the Spanish people. He, 
however, loved his little daughter dearly, and 
kept watch over her from a distance, till a 
rumor reached him that she was about to marry 
a very bad man. He promptly kidnapped her, 
so the father apparently eloped with his own 
daughter. He took her to America, where he 
was immediately arrested, and thrown into 

15 



Mediterranean Idyls 



prison. Now that the whole story has leaked 
out, steps are being taken to secure his release. 

My people went to the theater in Seville, 
and it seemed just like an infant class at 
school. The audience fidgeted and fussed 
and hissed at each other, like so many children. 
The play was a brand new one, a dramatized 
novel by Galdos, called Cassandra, and it was 
all about money. A stolid old woman was de- 
termined she would leave her possessions to 
the Church, whereupon all her sisters and her 
cousins, and her aunts, not to mention nephews 
and nieces, descended upon her, and demanded 
their share. Finally the young mistress of 
her husband's illegitimate son, who thought 
she was entitled to it all, murdered her. Of 
course all this was in Spanish, and as my peo- 
ple's Berlitz equipment in the language was 
not quite equal to a full understanding, they 
took an interpreter with them. 

Perhaps the reason for hearing so many 
somewhat risque stories in Seville was because 
Byron's Don Juan was born there — besides, 
they say that in summer it gets so hot that if 
you open your mouth out of doors, you will 

16 




STREET IX SENTLLE 



Mediterranean Idyls 



burn your tongue. 

Of course my mistress sketched all the bel- 
fries she could find in Cordova, Granada and 
Seville. I took a peep at her sketch-book 
when she returned, and recognized so many of 
my old friends it made me homesick to go 
down there myself. There was the Giralda 
tower with its many bells. It used to be a 
minaret, or prayer tower in the days of the 
Moors (1184). The Cathedral was then a 
mosque, and has since been used as the model 
for the tower in Madison Square Garden, New 
York, thus spanning the years to-day between 
Spain and the New World as the seas were 
once spanned so many years ago when Colum- 
bus sailed from Spain to discover the Western 
Continent. That was one reason why I was 
especially interested in the Giralda tower — 
another, of course, was on account of the bells, 
they were up so high, three hundred and five 
feet above the ground, and each one had really 
been christened with holy oil and given a name. 
One was called La Garda, another El Cantor 
and another San JNIiguel. The tower itself 
was built out of pieces of old Roman and 

17 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Gothic buildings on a square of forty-five feet. 
The walls were eight feet thick, and sometimes 
old Latin inscriptions would be found sticking 
to the stones — one of them was from the Book 
of Proverbs. 

It seems strange that in New York the 
weather vane on the top of the tower should be 
the old Roman goddess Diana, while the vane 
Giraldilla in the Seville Tower should be named 
Faith. It is thirteen feet high and weighs one 
and one-fourth tons, and carries the banner of 
Constantine — the first conqueror to force 
Christianity into the world. Beneath this 
tower inside the Cathedral at last lie the re- 
mains of Christopher Columbus; poor fellow, 
his bones traveled almost as much as he did; 
first they were buried in Valladolid, then 
they were brought to Seville; they stayed in a 
suburban church there for a year, and were 
then taken to Haiti. After the French took 
Haiti, the body was removed to Havana 
(1796). Finally in Havana this mighty sar- 
cophagus was made, four hundred years after 
the soul had departed, and now resting on 
the backs of four kings, the North, East, 

18 



Mediterranean Idyls 



South and West, it has at last found a place 
of honor in the Cathedral at Seville. The 
inscription upon it refers to "ungrateful 
America from its Mother Spain." It was on 
my mistress' birthday, March 31st, nearly four 
centuries before she was born, that Columbus 
was first formally received in Seville. Several 
of his manuscripts are preserved in the Cathe- 
dral — among them one written by him while 
in prison relating to the Biblical indications 
of the New World. He wrote this to pacify 
the Inquisition. 

The discovery of America advanced Spain 
to an unparalleled importance as far as no- 
toriety went; some say to an unparalleled un- 
importance in regard to the actual good it did 
to its own people, as the craze for gold had a 
most demoralizing effect. 

In Seville my mistress sketched the Pillars 
of Hercules. You know Hercules is sup- 
posed to have discovered Spain, just as Co- 
lumbus discovered America. With one foot 
on the continent of Africa he spanned the 
Straits of Gibraltar, placing the other on the 
continent of Europe. Where his foot rested 

1» 



Mediterranean Idyls 



on African soil a castle was built. It was 
from one of its parapets that the heir to the 
last of the Gothic kings was thrown to his death. 
His mother Frandina, a woman of masculine 
courage and understanding, was the first Suf- 
fragette in Europe. With her death, came to 
an end the supremacy of the Romans and the 
Goths, and the Moors rushed in to Seville with 
this watchword, "May Allah grant that Islam 
may rule eternally in this city." 

All these things the bells my mistress 
brought back with her told me, and her 
sketches too took me back to the old days 
when the Moors ruled in Seville, and Granada 
and Cordova. 

Cordova, the city of Pompey, is now but a 
ruin and a remembrance. Even the bells in 
the top of the tower, once also a minaret, 
mourn over its desolation, for the Cathedral 
was intended to have been a second Mecca, 
next in size to the largest mosque of Islam, a 
place for pilgrimages, its area equal to that of 
St. Peter's at Rome. Its many hundred mo- 
saics, now being uncovered for the first time, 
came from Constantinople. The flowing na- 

20 



Mediterranean Idyls 



ture of the arches above the motionless columns 
were meant to recall the crossing and interlac- 
ing jets of many fountains, the dome to re- 
semble a pineapple. You know it is against 
the principles of the Mohammedan religion to 
copy living things. On the headstones in the 
cemeteries of Constantinople a turban only 
marks the grave as that of a human being. 

The bells on their height of two hundred and 
twenty-five feet with St. Raphael poised above 
them, look down on a panorama of ruined city, 
river, mountains and desolate fields, and my 
mistress was glad to leave it all, and take the 
train to Granada. There again an old minaret 
had been turned into the bell tower of St. Peter 
and St. Paul — but, ''jon may break, you may 
shatter, the vase, if you will, but the scent of 
the roses will hang round it still." 

Thus Charles V might build his big, ugly 
palace inside the Alhambra with his motto 
''plus ultra' stuck over everything (before 
the discovery of America it had been "ne plus 
ultra'' as Spain was supposed to mark the 
limit of the Western World). All the min- 
arets might be changed into bell towers, still 

91 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the memory of the Moors will always cling to 
Granada and its Alhambra, or Red Tower, as 
the name signifies. Their architecture is like 
unto tents, the pillars tent poles, the sides tent 
embroidery. Everything connected with the 
Moors seems to suggest the "open" and their 
houses are but permanent tents. 

Mohammed said, "Thou givest safety from 
the breeze to the blades of grass, and inspirest 
terror in the very stars of heaven. When the 
shining stars quiver, it is through dread of 
thee, and when the grass of the field bends 
down, it is to give thee thanks." 

So there is a suggestion of caves and 
water in their architecture, dripping water 
forming stalactites. This thought must have 
been in the minds of the Moorish builders, for 
an inscription over a certain recess reads "He 
who comes to me tortured by thirst, will find 
water pure and fresh, sweet and unmixed. I 
am like the rainbow when it shines, and the svm 
is my life." So everywhere around the Al- 
hambra is the sound of running water, and 
when my mistress made her sketch from the 
Generalife or "Garden of Arif" she could look 



Mediterranean Idyls 



down on the Valley of the Darro, and think of 
the Moors with their love of nature. She 
could see the Alhambra with its gate through 
which Boabdil fled, which was afterwards 
walled up by his own request, and singing in 
her ears was the old ballad : 

There was crying in Granada, 

When the sun went down, 
Some calling on the Trinity, 

Some calling on Mahoun. 

Here passed away the Koran, 
There in the Cross was borne 

And here was heard the Christian bell 
And there the Moorish horn. 

Well it is a far cry from a Moorish palace 
to a garage; to tell the truth, I was getting 
just a wee bit tired of staying quietly in my 
stall in INIadrid, and longed to be out on the 
road again. 

You see I had only made two trips since my 
arrival, one to the Escorial and one to Toledo. 
The Escorial was interesting but gloomy on 
account of its basement being so filled with 
dead bodies; there are even empty coffins 

23 



Mediterranean Idyls 



resting in their niches waiting for the present 
young king and queen. No queen can be laid 
in the royal vault unless she has borne a child. 
There is a room for all the little royal children 
also who have died in their infancy. 

I enjoyed Toledo immensely, for the streets 
were too narrow for me to motor in, so I 
rested and watched the people and listened to 
the bells, while my master and mistress wan- 
dered about in this old Gothic capitol, where 
it is said, toleration and intoleration have been 
without parallel. My mistress made a sketch 
from the Alcazar of the belfries in the distance 
and Cervantes house just below. She had 
just reread Don Quixote, so the house inter- 
ested her mightily, and she was always gig- 
gling over the barber's pans hanging in front 
of the barber shops. She could see the poor 
old Don wearing one on his head, and could 
hear him saying, *'To you it may be but a 
barber's pan, but I know it is a helmet." Still, 
of course, to me the thing of paramount in- 
terest was always the bells. One was the* 
famous Campana Gorda, weighing two tons. 
Poor thing, it has been cracked by a too vio- 

24! 



Mediterranean Idyls 



lent use of the clapper (badajo) which here 
rests on the floor. The Gorda is surrounded 
by eight bells, and farther up are two more. 
In another stage of this tower is the huge 
wooden rattle, which is used continuously from 
Maunday Thursday till high mass on the 
Saturday before Easter. Just think, these 
three days are the only period of rest during 
the whole year for the bells of Spain in com- 
mon with those of all Catholic Christendom. 

My mistress longed for time to sketch by 
the Alcantara bridge; it is over the Tagus 
river, which surrounds the city on three sides, 
making it look like a full masted ship about 
to sail. However, as it has stood in that posi- 
tion for more than ten centuries, and watched 
the coming and the going of the Romans, the 
Moors and the Goths, I don't believe it will 
ever start off, but just remain forever as it 
now is, the Mecca of artists and tourists. 

I enjoyed the lovely twilight ride back from 
Toledo to Madrid, except when in passing 
through crowded little villages, children would 
try to snatch me off from my small perch. 
Luckily, Frederico, the chauffeur, looks after 

25 



MediteiTanean Idyls 



my comfort very carefully and allows no one 
to handle me but himself. 

The rest in Madrid did me lots of good for 
the journey hither had been a hard one, being 
my first attempt at mountain climbing. 
Crossing the Pyrenees I had experienced a 
curious sensation; the radiator under me got 
so hot I thought I should burst. Frederico 
noticed the beads of perspiration dropping 
from my brow. He jumped out and un- 
wound me, and I bounced oif as if shot out 
of a gun, and rolled over on the ground, fol- 
lowed by volumes of steam. I also remem- 
bered being cold in Burgos. They say it is 
the coldest spot in Spain, and that the sun like 
all other good things has to be imported there 
(noueve meses de invierno, tres de infierno). 
Snow has been known to fall there at the end 
of June. I remembered Papa Mocas, the 
funny little old bell inside the Cathedral, and 
how my mistress waited to see the queer little 
man lean over and tap the hour. 

My quarters in both Vitoria and Burgos, 
en route to Madrid had been fairly good, even 
if in Vitoria it was only a machine shop, and 

^6 



Mediterranean Idyls 



I had to zigzag around a pump to get in. In 
Burgos mine was the first machine to enter 
a brand new garage. 

But at last we left Madrid, about seven 
o'clock in the evening. For some distance 
many automobiles accompanied me. If I had 
realized that I was to cross the great Gaudar- 
rama JNIountains after dark I would have been 
scared to death, for we went through a cloud 
and then it rained, and O! how glad I was 
to find myself safe and sound in Segovia. 
But, alas, after that my life was a lonesome 
one, as for many days, not another automo- 
bile was to be seen. I had very funny quar- 
ters in Segovia. There was no garage and the 
automobile had to go through the front door 
of a private house, and live in the parlor. I 
could look across the street at the old ruins of 
the famous Cathedral, and I heard my mis- 
tress say she would rather spend a week 
sketching in Segovia than in any other place 
in Spain. Of Iberian origin, it, too, like To- 
ledo, resembles a ship in full sail going toward 
the setting sun, an unmatched picture of the 
Middle Ages. Its history is written in its 

n 



Mediterranean Idyls 



belfries, and its city walls with their eighty- 
three towers and old aqueduct. Funny how 
the Romans with all their learning never 
realized that water would seek its own level 
without the help of all this heavy masonry ! 

I too liked Segovia; there were so many bells 
— some were ringing all the time. In fact 
what made me take such a fancy to Spain was 
that every time we would enter a town, all the 
bells would see me coming and ring out sweet 
welcome. Even the donkeys as they passed 
loaded down with stones or bread in their im- 
mense panniers would give me a friendly wink 
and shake their bells at me, and as for the 
mules, their necks were covered with bells, 
several rows of little ones and a big one in the 
middle. I always associate three things with 
the first sight of a town in Spain, two tall cy- 
presses making a sort of gate through which 
we were to enter, a belfry and a bull ring. 
No matter how small the town, there they 
were, and in the country, flowers, like a Turk- 
ish rug of purple and yellow and magenta, 
with now and then a great red Baedecker of 
poppies thi^own down on the landscape. Poor 

m 



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SEGOVIA, "like a FULL-MASTED SHIP A HOC I' -yo SAIL 



Mediterranean Idyls 



little shorn lambs, wearing huge bells out of 
all j)roportion to their little shrunken bodies, 
and half-shorn donkeys, made me wish the 
cold wind might have been tempered a bit. 
My mistress said it was June, but I know it 
was December, and so did the peasants — pee- 
sants as Louis, the guide, called them — by the 
way they were muffled up. My mistress her- 
self was wrapped in a coat, heavy overcoat, 
thick rubber coat, and wound with mufflers 
and heavy woolen Jaeger gloves, while I still 
had only my mantilla and fan to keep me 
warm, and I felt sorry for the poor little 
carved Virgin my mistress had bought, stand- 
ing up in the automobile, with only a piece of 
paper between her and the cold wind. It was 
some comfort to think that as she was minus 
hands, there was no danger of their freezing. 
They tell a story of a Virgin in one of the 
towns through which we passed. She was 
called "Our Lady of the Die" because a 
gambler, having unsuccessfully called on her 
for aid in the game threw one of his dice at 
her, whereupon she began to bleed. If you 
look carefully you can still see the spots of 

29 



Mediterranean Idyls 



blood. I believe this was in Leon. 

On the road to Zamorra and Leon and Pa- 
lencia, I just hated my life. Up there on the 
radiator I was splashed with mud from head 
to foot, even one eye had a great splotch. The 
only fun I had was seeing the women tumble 
off their donkeys and the men being waked 
from their siestas in the ox-carts. Frederico 
learned to call "Oorah, Oorah" in a truly 
Spanish way to all the oxen, mules, sheep and 
jackasses. I know that all of them would 
have been far more frightened at our big tour- 
ing car if they had not seen me perched up 
there in front. They were used to bells, you 
see. 

The very bigness of the automobile caused 
us no end of trouble at the last, for our tires 
could not be duplicated. I was standing so 
near the front tires, I could hear them grum- 
bling, especially over the flat, rutty, wet roads. 
Finally one of them uttered a loud protest and 
burst with a report like a gun. A patch was 
put on to silence its voice, and after that it 
kept quiet. 

Sometimes staring me in the face was a 
30 



Mediterranean Idyls 



sign that meant I was in for a bounce, as a 
sort of inverted "Thank you, ma'am" or 
waterway was approaching. 

Another sign meant a raiboad crossing. 
In Spain, the gates shutting off the track are 
manipulated entirely by women. The week 
before we entered Spain, an American auto- 
mobile had approached one of these closed 
gates at night, and had tried in vain to awake 
the female watchman. After waiting an hour, 
seeing what seemed to be a possible road round 
about, the chauffeur tried it, with the result 
that his automobile got stuck between the rails. 
A train approached; frantically he waved 
the motor car's lighted lamps, but in vain, the 
train crashed into it, and when we left Spain, 
the American Consul, and the Spanish Gov- 
ernment w^ere still trying to decide who was to 
blame. 

Of course that made me watch all the signs 
of the road very carefully. The words 
"Curva Violent i" made my heart throb, but 
I knew Frederico so well by this time, I was 
sure he would "Pehgi'o automobiles Des- 
pacho" in other words, go slowly. A V sign 

31 



Mediterranean Idyls 



meant a bridge and I must say all the bridges 
I went over in Spain were good ones, many 
of them dating back to the old Roman days. 
They were of stone, quite narrow with Vs at 
the sides for the passerby to slip into when an 
automobile, a flock of sheep or a team of oxen 
would fill up the space. 

I was so surprised at Leon, the poorest ap- 
pearing city we visited, to find myself in an 
up-to-date garage with the nicest kind of ac- 
commodations, for we had met no automobiles, 
and at Zamorra, the town just before, I had 
had to zigzag around mules and stay all night in 
the open courtyard. The street approaching 
this courtyard was so narrow, it seemed as if it 
would be impossible ever to get me out again, 
and for the privilege of staying out in this cold 
bleak yard my people had to pay a goodly 
sum. But that was nothing to the price they 
paid for gasoline that day. They bought it 
at a drug store outside the city walls, and it 
cost at the rate of twenty-four dollars for one 
filling. 

In Palencia I slept on the back veranda of 
a Singer Sewing Machine office. It was fun 



Mediterranean Idyls 



watching the girls sew. 

These bad, wet roads kept up for thirty miles 
beyond Palencia, when all of a sudden we 
struck into the mountains that I had seen in 
the distance, and that my heart had dreaded, 
but my, the difference! I had not realized 
that we were really up so high all through this 
cold, wet, level country till we began to descend. 
The road became in surface like the best of 
Massachusetts roads; there were sharp curves 
and tremendous drops. The poor patched tire 
whispered to me that it was going to hold tight 
till we got down on the level. There were no 
bells in these mountain fastnesses, I don't 
know why, because there was much more for the 
sheep to eat here on these northern slopes than 
back on the plains. Beautiful trees and 
shrubs, and ferns and waterfalls greeted the 
eye in every direction. Suddenly the road be- 
came messy again. I heard the jangling of 
Cathedral bells, which always proclaimed my 
entrance into a town. Trolley cars also gave 
me a friendly tinkle, and we found ourselves 
once more by the sea at Santander on the Bay 
of Biscay. There I lodged with all sorts of 



Mediterranean Idyls 



motor boats in a sheet iron structure called a 
modern garage. 

Who was it said that there was no curiosity in 
the Spanish people? Whoever did made a 
mistake, for my mistress never sketched, the 
automobile never stopped, an open air lunch- 
eon was never eaten, but that it was a signal 
for the gathering of all the little children — 
chicos and cliicas — and for all the men and 
women in the vicinity. 

My last night in Spanish territory was 
spent in another private house in Durango, 
the door of which was just wide enough to 
allow the car to enter. A lot of tables and 
chairs were stored in the same room, and I had 
hardly space in which to breathe, but the little 
village was filled with happy people dancing 
on the gravel all day and half the night long 
celebrating their patron Saint's day. 

The old rotten tire again whispered to me 
that it was going to get me out of Spain all 
right and into the model garage at Biarritz, a 
garage so perfect that any city might be proud 
of it; floors slanting so that the chauffeur 
might always get his car out without cranking, 

34 



31 edit err ane an Idyls 



bedrooms and restaurant for the chauffeurs, 
equal to the nicest kind of a little hotel. I had 
stopped there on the way into Spain, and I 
certainly did look forward to being clean and 
respectable once again, and I heaved a sigh of 
relief when I found the tire had kept its word 
and landed me safe and sound. This garage 
is the great meeting place of cars from all over 
the world; the king's car and the Americans' 
car on the same level ; but with all this luxury 
I sometimes longed for the simple little vil- 
lages of Spain with their bells and their bel- 
fries, and I thought of one special belfry on 
which a stork had built a nest (they say the 
stork is always hovering over the royal pal- 
ace) . The little storks were in their nest while 
the father stork stood on one leg looking down 
into the huge bells as they clanged their last 
good-by to me. I can see now in imagina- 
tion, the old belfries of Spain when they once 
were the minarets of the Moors, and in place 
of the ringing of the bells, I can hear the call 
of the Mohammedan to prayer "Allah, Allah. 
Great is Allah and Mohammed is his prophet." 
My mistress is bringing back with her a book 
35 



Mediterranean Idyls 



of poems which the author, a Spanish Marquis, 
gave her as a parting present, and in my ears 
above the noise of the ship as it plows its way 
through the Mediterranean rings the closing 
line: 

"Des cloche$ le langage est toujour Ho- 
quent." 



56 




=^"^ 



SECOND IDYL 




AMONG THE LOTUS BLOSSOMS 

AS TOLD BT A PILLOW 



ti 





AMONG THE LOTUS BLOSSOMS 




VERY child, no 
doubt, has been 
brought up on Haw- 
thorne's wonderful fairy tales about the 
ancient Greeks, and knows the story of Pan- 
dora and her Box by heart. 

Well, I am not Pandora, nor her Box. I 
am really only a soft little yielding pillow filled 
with down. You may not think a pillow could 
possibly know anything, but my mistress al- 
ways takes me on her travels. 

On the outgoing voyage this winter I lay 
on the back of the steamer chair basking in the 
sunshine and idly enjoyed watching the blue 
waves of the Mediterranean; such a contrast 
to the vigorous winter we had left behind. 

But now on the return trip I am all stuffed 
up with facts and fancies mixed in with my 
feathers. 

39 



Mediterranean Idyls 



You see just before going to Egypt, my 
mistress embroidered on me a pair of big 
Egyptian eyes, never dreaming that I was 
really going to look through them. Then she 
put a cord around me, with little loops at the 
corners, that I could use for ears. Finally she 
forgot to sew me up quite tightly, so that gave 
a chance for all these little facts and fancies to 
slip into me quite easily. 

She carried me with her wherever she went 
in Egypt, so I was pushed and squeezed into 
all sorts of queer out-of-the-way nooks and 
corners. 

If she had only let me alone to lie quietly in 
the cabin of our lazy Nile steamer, I would 
have been perfectly satisfied. With my two 
big eyes I could have watched the beautiful 
boats go sailing by which my mistress was for- 
ever sketching. She called them the Butter- 
flies of the Nile. They are entirely diif erent 
from our American sailboats. For one thing 
they can only sail in one direction, and that is 
straight with the wind. Isn't it fortu- 
nate that the wind nearly always blows up- 
stream? So when they turn around they sim- 



Mediterranean Idyls 



ply float back with the current. 

And the boats are just the same pattern as 
the ones in which Cleopatra used to ride so 
many hundred years ago. But the word boat 
is different. It is such a big word, ''dahdbeahf 

Instead of letting me lie there quietly, 
I was poked ignominiously under her knee 
whenever she rode a donkey, or else I was car- 
ried under the dirty, smelly arm of an Arab 
boy who had to run as fast as the donkey. Of 
course he would perspire, and that was not a 
bit nice for me. I liked best the chairs carried 
on poles supported on the shoulders of four 
Egyptian men. They would sing as they 
walked, something like this : 



ftr,rl , L" Hj^^^ p 



HaWal-la HaWal-la Hail! O! Hall I OI 

and that put me to sleep. I learned after- 
wards that it meant "Lord help us! Lord 
help us !" Once I had to ride on a camel — six- 
teen miles — and a trotting one at that, and I 
got so flattened I thought I would never puff 
out again. My mistress insisted on always tak- 

41 



31 edit err ane an Idyls 



ing me with her, and then when she got to some 
specially nasty, dirty old place, she would 
plump me into it and sit on my back and 
sketch. I positively choked to death in some 
of those old tombs, and once I nearly caught 
my death of cold lying on a lump of plowed 
ground. You see Egypt is a rich agricultural 
country just as far as the Nile can overflow its 
banks. Beyond that lies the desert on both 
sides of the river. 

This particular lump of plowed ground was 
on the edge of the desert, so in color there 
was a distinct line of demarkation, the vivid 
green of the crops on one side, the gray desert 
on the other, and she was sketching the Colossi, 
two lonesome old statues, that have been sit- 
ting and looking at the grandeur that once was 
Thebes for ever and ever so many thousand of 
years. They are so lonesome that it is said 
they cry all the time, and according to the old 
folklore of Egypt, their tears are what make 
the profuse dew of Egypt. My mistress has 
always been taught that a beautiful object 
should never be defaced by the carving of one's 
name upon it. But time, if there is enough of 

42 



^ 



rf 



^^"1^. 



1 



Mediterranean Idyls 



it, sometimes makes even wrong things seem 
right, and when she read the names of Hadrian, 
the old Roman Emperor, and Balbilla, the 
ancient poetess, it made those statues seem 
very human. Did you know that the map of 
Egypt is shaped just exactly like a lotus 
flower? The lotus blossom is something like a 
pond lily, if you can imagine a pond lily as 
single instead of double. 

The wavering line of the river makes the 
limp, undulating stem, while its numerous 
mouths, or delta, outline the blossom. Look 
it up on a map and you will see the resem- 
blance. 

It is too bad the lotus flowers no longer grow 
in Egypt. The river used to be full of them, 
and the old Egyptians were so fond of the 
pretty lilies that they made the columns of their 
temples look like them, straight and tall, and 
bursting into bloom at the top, sometimes into 
just one pure, full-blown flower, sometimes 
into a bud, and then again into a cluster of 

Note: In the map of Egypt, on page 37, the numbers refer 
to: — 0, Fayum; 1, Alexandria; 2, Port Said; 3, Thebes; 4, First 
Cataract. 

43 



Mediterranean Idyls 



buds tied together, and all painted the loveliest 
shades of blue and copper. 

You see, I really learned a great deal travel- 
ing about so much. 

While my mistress would be sitting on me 
in the tombs (queer woman, she seemed to like 
being in tombs and with dead people if they 
had been dead long enough) I used to get one 
eye out and one ear and then I would peep at 
all those old gods and goddesses that some peo- 
ple made fun of and some were mightily in- 
terested in, until I knew them quite by heart. 

The old Egyptians had an idea that the 
world was flat like the top of a basket and that 
they lived on the lid. The bottom of this bas- 
ket was immersed in oceans of water. What 
became of the sun at night they could 
not imagine — you know it never rains in 
Egypt, so of course the sun shines every day, 
popping up every morning and disappearing 
every night over the earth's rim, in a blaze of 
glory, all day long making things to grow, 
spreading life everywhere. Thus they thought 
it was a god, and worshiped it. In the morn- 
ing it was the little boy Horus, with hawk head, 

44 



Mediterranean Idyls 



meaning that he was getting ready to fly, at 
noon as Ra, the father, and in the evening Mut, 
the mothe(r. At night the god dropped down 
underneath the world and apparently died, so 
they made him look like a dead man or mummy. 
Then they gave him a new name, Osiris, and 
he is generally pictured as seated at the top 
of a staircase, or in a niche. Being dead, of 
course he could not stand alone, so he is often 
represented as being propped up by another 
god. This other god is named Anubis, and 
has a dog's head. There are so many stories 
in these days of how a dog who has been faith- 
ful to his master all through his life will often 
be found watching by his master's dead body 
that I imagine that is what gave rise to this 
idea, for people were really the same in those 
days as they are to-day. I suppose Anubis 
was really the prototype of our faithful old 
watchdog Tray. 

At the birth of a little Egyptian baby, pic- 
tures on the walls always make him appear as 
twins. There are always two babies and two 
nurses, and he is given two names, one by which 
he is to be known in this world, and one in 

45 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the world to come. This last name is what is 
called his "Ka" or spirit name, and when he 
died, or in other words, slipped under the lid 
of the basket, he was henceforth to be known 
only by his Ka name. 

If you ever go to Egypt you will constantly 
see this basket painted on the walls, and now 
you will know what is meant by it. The whole 
history and mythology is written in pictures 
on the walls. The word for these pictures is, 
as of course you know. Hieroglyphs, but Ibra- 
him, my mistress' guide, always pronounced it 
"Higher Griefs," so it was a good while before 
she quite understood what he was talking about. 
It took a good deal of study and sketching on 
her part to form any clear conception of what 
these queer contorted figures really meant. In 
the first place, perspective in the modern sense 
was denied them, probably by law, so you will 
see the face turned one way, the body another, 
the feet another. The top of a picture meant 
things at a distance, or in heaven; the bottom, 
things near to, or earthly. My mistress noted 
this particularly in one of the tombs, where she 
tried to sketch by the light of a tallow candle. 

46 



Mediterranean Idyls 



And that reminds me, where did the Egyptians 
get their light by which to paint these pictures? 
There are no blackened, sooty spots to be 
found, and yet "Egyptian darkness" is no 
metaphorical term, but a veritable fact. There 
is a darkness that can almost be felt, as I real- 
ized to my sorrow in this very tomb. 

The pictures on the wall where I was being 
squashed to death on a dusty stairway, repre- 
sented the journey of a dead man into the 
watery world beneath the lid of the basket. 
He was in a boat, of course. It was being 
hauled by a whole lot of gods and goddesses. 

Imps that lived down there would keep pop- 
ping up, asking the poor dead body all sorts 
of questions, such as, "What is the name of 
your boat?" The answer should be "Hennu." 
"What is the name of the left oar?" "What 
is the name of the right oar?" "What is the 
seat on which you are standing called?" 
"What is your Ka name?" If he could not 
answer correctly, they would tease him cruelly, 
just as Freshmen at college are hazed by their 
upper-class men. 

Of course, there were some good spirits who 
47 



Mediterranean Idyls 



tried to help the poor fellow by prompting and 
whispering the correct answers in his ear. 

Sometimes little figures like dolls were bur- 
ied with him, who made the replies for him. 
They were called "Answerers" or Shabti. If 
you ever go to Egypt you will wonder why 
so many little blue dolls were made, and now 
you will know. 

If a little Egyptian baby belonged to a royal 
family, his name is always written inside of a 
little oval frame with a line at the side. The 
name by which he was known when he was alive 
comes first, then the spirit one, and between the 
two will be a little bird and a ring with a dot 
in it. The ring represents the sun, and the 
whole is pronounced The Son of the Sun. 
Finally a book was made for him called "The 
Book of the Dead," or "The Book of Breath- 
ings," and a copy was buried with him, con- 
taining the dead man's names and any other 
information it was necessary for him to have. 
It was propped up between his legs, so he 
could easily read it, so whenever he had noth- 
ing else to do, he could spend his time study- 
ing the replies. If he ever forgot anything 

48 



Mediterranean Idyls 



during the period of examination, he could take 
a peep at it and refresh his memory. 

You see, these old Egyptians thought it was 
absolutely necessary to save the whole body, if 
they ever expected to go to heaven, so the body 
was embalmed and made into a mummy. 
Then the heart was put into a vase and into 
it were stuffed all the naughty things he had 
ever said or done. Imagine, if your hearts had 
to be put into a vase with all this stuffing, how 
big do you think the vase would have to be? 
I am sure my pillow cover would never hold 
them all — the feathers would surely burst out 
of every stitch. 

Besides, the vase had to be weighed — this 
was the most awful test of all. It was put on 
one side of a scale and a feather on the other. 
My mistress made a sketch of the goddess of 
justice, with the feather on her head. As usual 
she had to sit on me on the ground to do it, and 
peep through a railing which shut off the en- 
trance to the cave-like tomb. When this poor 
little heart was weighed, there were forty-two 
solemn looking judges all in a row. The head 
one had a monkey with him; why, I don't know. 

49 



Mediterranean Idyls 



These judges asked him a whole lot of 
questions, — in fact, they asked just forty-two 
— why he had lied to this man, why he had been 
mean to another, etc. 

If his wicked acts had been so many that the 
scale just balanced with the feather, the heart 
was destroyed, the mummy was destroyed, 
and there was never any future life for him. 
That was the most awful punishment that 
could possibly happen to him. 

The great desire of the old Egyptians was 
to keep on living after death. That was the 
reason they were embalmed so carefully, they 
thought they couldn't live if the body was eaten 
up by worms. They knew beforehand that 
their hearts were going to be weighed, so they 
tried to bribe their judges. You will see on 
the walls a king offering a dish of vegetables 
to one god, the king and his wife offering a 
goat to another, the king even trying to bribe 
a god by offering a piece of cloth or bread, or 
trying to explain to the gods that he had built 
so many beautiful temples for them that he 
thought it ought to count in his favor. 

These acts really helped a good deal toward 
60 




OLD MEMPHIS 



Mediterranean Idyls 



softening the judges. 

When at last the heart had triumphantly- 
stood the test of all this questioning and weigh- 
ing, it was allowed to come into the light, and 
live forever in the Elysian Fields of Egypt — 
their heaven. 

The idea of heaven was just Egypt over 
again, where the Nile would overflow its banks 
just enough to produce fine crops, but not so 
much as to melt their mud houses. You know, 
their houses are built of sun-dried mud and not 
of wood or stone like ours. 

But their tombs are like underground pal- 
aces, dug deep down into the earth, and the 
walls are covered all over, every inch of them, 
with pictures of the way they would like to 
live — that is, doing no work but having every- 
thing done for them, the fields tilled, the ground 
plowed, the bread baked, all by fairy hands. 

But in order to enjoy all these good things 
the heart must actually get back into its body; 
that is another reason why the bodies are so 
carefully saved and hidden. At the time of 
the embalming, the body must be presented 
with the key of life. It looks something like 

51 



Mediterranean Idyls 



a tennis racket. The water of life must be 
poured over its head; its mouth must be 
propped open and the breath of life blown into 
it, and there it lies waiting for the return of 
the heart. It would be waiting there still, deep 
down in the sealed-up mummy chamber, if all 
of us so-called civilized nations — Americans, 
Germans, Italians, etc. — had not all the time 
been digging the bodies out. Sometimes the 
diggers find only beads, sometimes furniture. 
Napoleon was one of the first to find furniture, 
and our Empire chairs date back to his visit to 
Eg} pt. When the excavators open up a new 
tomb, of course the air rushes in, and many 
times causes everything to crumble away. 
That is the reason the objects are now to be 
seen encased in glass, mostly in museums. 

On account of this tendency to crumble, the 
people who are superintending the digging 
immediately photograph each process, first the 
ground as it looks before a spade has touched 
it, then the door that the sands of time have 
kept covered, and so on all through the whole 
"find" as they call it. The wives of the diggers 
are kept busy stringing the many beads, fol- 



Mediterranean Idyls 



lowing the patterns that are found in the pic- 
tures on the walls. 

You remember how in Hawthorne's beauti- 
ful children's stories of Greek mythology, 
Cupid called his mother Aphrodite. Well, the 
little hawk headed Horus' pet name for his 
mother Isis was Hathor. She used to pretend 
she was a cow, I suppose because mothers give 
milk to their little babies, so you can easily rec- 
ognize her image by the horns on her head. 
She had a sister Nephthys, who is often mis- 
taken for her, but you can tell the diiFerence 
between the two goddesses because, in addition 
to the hprns, Hathor has a little chair on top 
of her head, and her sister has what looks like 
an umbrella stand. 

The different crowns or headgear of the 
Egyptian gods is a study by itself. The most 
important of all to remember, however, are 
those of Lower and Upper Egypt. You 
know, the Nile is upside down on the map. It 
is almost the only river in the whole world 
that flows northward, so Lower Egypt is on 
the top of the map, and Upper Egypt at the 
foot. The crown of the King of Lower Egypt 

63 



Mediterranean Idyls 



looks exactly like a bottle, perhaps because the 
water is deepest there just before it empties 
into the Mediterranean Sea. The crown of 
Upper Egypt at the bottom of the map resem- 
bles a dipper. 

Now when the bottle is in the dipper the 
king, who wears this curious crown, used to be 
Lord over the whole of Egypt. You will be 
seeing these crowns all the time, and this 
thought will help you to remember, because 
everything over there seems very complicated. 
Of course I would of myself never have under- 
stood if I had not listened to my mistress and 
afterwards stored these explanations away in- 
side of me. For instance, she was pointing out 
to somebody what a pretty idea the gods of 
Yesterday and To-day convey. They stand 
back to back with the sun in between. Of 
course all these stories are to be read on the 
walls, but people traveling in Egypt are gen- 
erally in too much of a hurry to ferret them 
out. 

Strange to say, the pictures I liked best were 
those of the vultures. It seems a little queer 
to like vultures, but these are so often painted 

54 



Mediterranean Idyls 



right over me, and I can see them so plainly 
while my mistress is sketching. They are 
painted in such beautiful colors and always 
seem to be flying in to the temple, never out. 
I heard afterwards that that is because they are 
supposed to be bringing in tidings of victory 
to the spirit of the dead king. The vulture 
is an emblem of motherhood also, why, I do not 
know, unless the outspread wings convey a 
sense of protection. 

The king was always very glad to receive 
news, for he was hidden so deeply away in a 
room down beneath the ground. Even his 
door was plastered up and all smoothed over so 
nobody could possibly suspect it was there. 

But after all he wasn't a bit lonesome, for 
he had two big eyes painted on his coffin, just 
like mine, and two more on the wall. He could 
peep through them any time he wanted, to see 
how much his friends really remembered him. 
If they thought a great deal of him, they 
would bring him presents, food and wine, and 
those blue dolls I told you about — the answer- 
ers, you remember. 

Of course his relatives couldn't get into the 
65 



Mediterranean Idyls 



room where his body lay concealed, but there 
was an image of him that looked exactly like 
him, placed in an outside room, and they gave 
the presents to it. They called it his double, 
or Ka. 

Another thing that kept him from getting 
lonesome was that whenever his spirit felt like 
wandering about it could sneak through an imi- 
tation door, painted or carved on the wall of 
his room, and get into a httle bird called the 
Bennu bird and fly all over the world. This 
bird had a human face. Sometimes it would 
get hungry and tired and then it would have 
to seek one of its statue doubles somewhere and 
get food. My mistress wondered why she 
found so many statues of the same king all 
up and down the Nile, and that is the reason. 

My mistress, being a woman, was of course 
immensely interested in the queens of Egypt, 
especially Queen Hatasu and Queen Nefartari. 
She is bringing home a picture of Hatasu's 
mother done in plaster which is such an exact 
reproduction of the pictures on the walls that 
everybody thought it had been chiseled out. 
It is against the law now to bring away any- 

5Q 




'%-:% 



# 




Mediterranean Idyls 



thing original that may be found there, but 
this caste is exactly like the real thing. The 
headdress is made out of a vulture. 

Hatasu was the most wonderful queen of 
Egypt, and so original. She was the first one 
to organize an exploring expedition, and the 
first woman in history to have a garden, — you 
can read all about it on the walls. In these 
days when women have so much freedom, and 
will soon have still more, imagine Hatasu — 
thousands of years ago — reaching out and ac- 
complishing more than all the Egyptian kings. 
She built the most beautiful temple, had the 
first garden, explored the greatest amount of 
country, and reigned many years. Yet her 
successor brother scratched her face and name 
off from almost everything, and stuck his owti 
on. It is only recently that anything has been 
revealed as to what a great woman she was. 

The other queen in whom my mistress took 
a great interest was supposed to have been 
the Princess who found Moses in the bulrushes. 
Her name was Nefartari, and she was the wife 
of the great King Rameses. 

The women must have had brains in those 
67 



\ 



Mediterranean Idyls 



days, for my mistress made a sketch of Nefar- 
tari playing chess. There are two queens and 
three bishops on the board, and in her uphfted 
hand is a pawn which she is about to play. 

Something very funny happened on our visit 
to this tomb of Nefartari. My mistress was 
sitting on me on a high shelf a foot deep with 
dust. My master was reading a guide book, 
when a lady entered and said, "I see you are 
reading Baedeker — that will save me a lot of 
trouble. Come and explain to me all about 
those old heathen gods and goddesses." So 
he acted the part of guide and repeated to her 
all that he had just been reading. After she 
had left the tomb, her companion turned to 
him and said : "You are an American, are you 
not? Well, perhaps you will be interested to 
know that my friend is the daughter of one 
of America's most famous generals." 

Then another woman came in who is a very 
well-known author. My mistress wondered if 
she were intending to make Nefartari the hero- 
ine of her next historical novel. Nefartari was 
great enough to be made into a heroine. In 
all the statues of Rameses, although she is 

68 



Mediterranean Idyls 



standing by his side, she is represented as only 
as high as his knee. I wonder if that has been 
typical of the male attitude throughout the 
ages! 

The tomb of Nefartari is the most beautiful 
of all, on account of the wall painting. It is 
not visited by the regular Cook tourist, and the 
caretaker made a great mystery of my mis- 
tress being allowed to sketch there. It is 
located in the necropolis of Thebes. My 
mistress had to have it explained to her that 
necropolis was a word meaning the place 
where dead people live, just like metropolis is 
where live people live — you know, I told you 
she liked being with dead people ! 

The most famous necropolis of Egypt is 
across the river from Thebes, or Luxor, as it 
is now called. Such a long, hard donkey ride 
as it is, getting there, bumping over hard stones, 
climbing steep paths, being stung to death 
with heavy sand, or burned to death with hot 
sun. I couldn't even rest while my master and 
mistress and Ibrahim, their guide, ate lunch in 
the cool shadow of a tomb entrance, for she sat 
on me all the time. I never even got a drop 

59 



Mediterranean Idyls 



of hot coffee spilled on me from their thermos 
bottle. 

In this necropolis all the old Pharaohs of 
the Bible were buried, and their tombs are 
really underground palaces, the walls being 
painted in the most beautiful colors, not the 
raw garish colors in which they are usually 
copied, but lovely soft Turkish-rug, time- 
mellowed tones. They represent boats and 
snakes and all kinds of tilings both common- 
place and imaginative. 

Sometimes at the entrance of one of these 
underground tombs one would start in with 
a snake's head, and follow its convolutions 
on the walls for what seemed like miles and 
miles deep down in the bowels of the earth, 
through dark galleries, down staircase after 
staircase, until at last one would reach its tail. 
Then, spread all over the ceiling, would be 
found a goddess with head hanging all the way 
down one side of the wall and her feet down 
the other. 

The Egyptians understood better than 
Christians how to adjust wings to their angels. 
They fastened them to their arms instead of 

60 



Mediterranean Idyls 



their shoulder-blades, so perhaps their god- 
desses did actually fly. 

You see, even if I was crushed in pretty hard 
beneath my mistress, I managed to keep that 
one ear uncovered and listen with all my 
might. That is the way I came to understand 
so much. The art of Egypt is so very ab- 
stract that unless my mistress had been some- 
thing of an artist herself she would never have 
appreciated the excellent designs always to be 
found in a given space, or the beauty and deli- 
cacy of some of the bas-reliefs. She heard 
some authority say that it was absolutely im- 
possible for the modern pen, pencil or brush 
to reproduce exactly these rehef s, some of them 
being cut to less than the depth of a coin. She 
tried to do it herself once. The subject inter- 
ested her, as it was the only instance she had 
come across of the picture of an artist actually 
at work at his easel. If you will turn back to 
the first word of this story you can see him for 
yourself. 

His head is pretty well battered up by the 
hard knocks of time, and it was difficult to get 
far enough off to see the design well, for it 

61 



Mediterranean Idyls 



was on the side of the door frame at the en- 
trance to the tomb of JMeraruka, an overseer. 
As usual, she wedged me into a tight little 
place and sat on me. Just think, this artist 
was working, brush in hand, over five thousand 
years ago. It looks as though he were paint- 
ing the outside edge of his picture, but that is 
because he was not allowed to draw in per- 
spective. The title of the picture upon the 
easel is "The Seasons," not four seasons, but 
three, as the ancient Egyptians knew but three, 
the season of Inundation, of Planting, and of 
Reaping, each containing four months. My 
mistress studied up the hieroglyphs afterwards 
and found that the first cartouche means Inun- 
dation, the one with the seed above it Planting, 
and the one with the little flowers Reaping. 
It was so interesting. She says seeing things 
in their natural surroundings, instead of in a 
museum is just as different as the difference 
between seeing a stuffed bird or a live one. I 
heard her read aloud a little story that has 
recently been deciphered from some old hiero- 
glyphs. You know, the old Egyptians had 
no alphabet, but just made pictures like our 

62 



Mediterranean Idyls 



own Indians. I learned by heart the first two 
pages of this primitive story. It was called 

THE STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 

"There was once on a time brothers two, the children 
of one mother and of one father. Anpu was the name of 
the elder; was Bata the name of the younger. Now as 
regards Anpu, he possessed a house and had a wife; and 
was his brother younger living with him after the man- 
ner of a servant, for it was he who made the clothes, it 
was he who followed after his (Anpu's) cattle in the 
fields; he it was who did the plowing; he it was who la- 
bored, he it was who performed the duties all, which 
were connected with the fields; and behold! was the 
young man a farmer excellent; not existed the like of 
him in the land, the land, the whole of it. . . . Now 
thus it was during days many, upon those days that was 
his brother younger following after his cattle according 
to his wont of every day, and he returned to his home 
every evening, and he was laden with vegetables of all 
kinds of the fields." 



HdJSC 



This means vegetables. 

One day, on our way home from the tombs 
of the kings in the Libyan Mountains, we dis- 

63 



Mediterranean Idyls 



mounted from our donkeys and I thought at 
last I was going to have a chance to expand 
myself with fresh air. You see, I had been 
squashed such a long time. 

The brilliant golden light was striking slant- 
ingly against the steep golden cliffs, within 
which slumbered the dead, or at least as many 
as the excavators couldn't find. We were 
alone, miles from any habitation ; not a vestige 
of anything green was to be seen; not even a 
weed. Everything was hard and glaring and 
sterile. Suddenly we were surprised by see- 
ing a man, and to our astonishment he invited 
us to have tea with him. He was living all by 
himself in a little mud hut around the corner 
of the mountain. He was digging, of course, 
and was the assistant of an American, Mr. 
Theodore Davis, of whom the nation ought to 
be very proud, for he has made the most mar- 
velous discoveries of anyone in Egypt. 

We, — I say we, because so much had already 
been sifted into me that I began to take almost 
as active an interest in things as my master 
and mistress — had another adventure one 
day in those same Libyan Mountains. They 

64* 



Mediterranean Idyls 



are called mountains, but they are really just 
the desert humped up. Out there on a heap 
of stones lay a man almost unconscious, and I 
do believe if it hadn't been for me and the 
thermos bottle, he would have died. His don- 
key, by a sudden jerk, had thrown him against 
a sharp rock, breaking a muscle in his back. 
My mistress tucked me under his head, some 
hot coffee from the thermos bottle was forced 
through his lips, our donkey boys sent to the 
tombs for a physician, where Lord C. was con- 
ducting some investigations, and a bed bor- 
rowed from a native mud hut. Some Arabs 
were found to carry the bed, and at last he 
was started off to the hotel some four miles 
distant. 

I afterwards learned that I had nestled 
against the illustrious head of royalty! 

Speaking of royalty, there were three old 
Egyptian Kings with whom I became quite fa- 
miliar. Set! I, Rameses II, and Thutmosis III, 
a sort of one, two, three combination that makes 
me remember them. They built so many tem- 
ples; I believe I visited them all and was 
crushed in them all. What my master and 



Mediterranean Idyls 



mistress found to interest them so much I fail 
to see, but instead of being satisfied with one 
visit, they would return again and again. 

What I liked best were the little excavating 
boys. There were so many of them, and they 
all wore blue aprons and skin tight caps, and 
carried little baskets of dirt on their heads. 
They would go along in a little procession, 
singing at the tops of their voices. The harder 
they worked, the louder they sang, and such 
a mournful little song, all about how they 
wished the dinner hour would come — it was so 
long since breakfast and their little tunmiies 
were so empty. I don't believe they would 
have sung at all if they had had my work to do 
— they wouldn't have had any breath ; anyway 
I know I didn't feel like singing one bit. 

The only rest I had was when we were on 
the Nile boat near the Second Cataract. Val- 
entine's Day was approaching, and my mis- 
tress was busy fixing up some Egyptian 
valentines. The verses were selected from a 
pamphlet called "An Egyptian Peasant's 
Love Songs," translated by Mrs. Breasted, 
the wife of our American Egyptologist. The 

66 



Mediterranean Idyls 



decorations were from the pictures on the 
walls of the temples. One of the love songs I 
heard her read aloud. First it was in Arabic, 
then followed the translation: 

"I mounted to the roof 

And unburdened my love to Allah; 

There I found three, who were reading in God's Word; 

They said to me: 'Wilt thou take thy cousin on thy 

father's side?' 
I said: 'No, by Allah.' 
They said to me: 'Wilt thou take thy cousin on thy 

mother's side?' 
"I said: 'No, by Allah's law/ 
They said to me: 'Wilt thou take the stranger that is 

within thy gates?' 
Then I said to myself: 'In Allah's name.' " 

After Valentine's Day came the hardest day 
of my whole trip. I rode donkey back for 
four hours, when the thermometer was at least 
110 degrees right through the desert of the 
Soudan. 

We rode from Wady Haifa to the rock of 
Abusir, and from its dizzy height looked down 
at the rapids of the Second Cataract. 

Peeping from under the donkey boy's arm, 
67 



Mediterranean Idyls 



I saw seven little black balls caught by the cur- 
rent. They swirled and swirled and finally 
struck a rock, then seven black bodies jumped 
up and off came a cloth from each head. In 
an instant it was tied round their loins, and 
they were fully dressed for company. With 
inflated pigskins in their arms, up they scram- 
bled to the top of the rock and posed for my 
mistress, with the thought of "backsheesh," 
their word for tips, in their minds. 

And now, dear mistress who made me, 
whether it was that hot ride in the desert or 
being crushed too much into the dust, I want 
to confess to you that I have fallen upon griev- 
ous days. I am ill; I have an eruption; my 
insides are coming through my skin; I no 
longer give pleasure. If anyone simply points 
his finger at me I fly at him and cover him 
with feathers. Won't you please cure me 
when I get home? 

I have been ignominiously thrust into a bag ; 
I am hidden away on the top shelf of our cabin 
instead of being allowed the privilege of sup- 
porting your dear head out on the deck. 

I am not enjoying my homeward voyage on 
68 





C(.U.l :A1.\.-i in lilK TKMPl.h (JK }MiIL.4i 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the Mediterranean one bit. 



Listen to a pillow's secret 
Thou and thou alone must read. 
I am dying, Egypt, dying. 
Ebbs the downy life-tide fast; 
And the dark Osirian shadows 
Gather on the dust storms' blast; 
Let thy needle, Lady, mend me. 
Get thy thread, and all I need. 




This sign means pillow in hieroglyphic writing, and on it is 
Inscribed the 166th Chapter of the Book of the Dead. 



69 



JlXi 

THIRD IDYL 
IN THE LAND OF JACOB'S WELL 

AS TOLD BY A BOTTLE OF WATER 




IN THE LAND OF JACOB'S WELL 

ROB ABLY when you see this title — 
"In the Land of Jacob's Well," a pic- 
ture will immediately come to you of 
artistic pottery, gracefully poised on 
the heads of pretty Oriental maidens. 
If so, you are going to be disap- 
pointed. I am only a hot-water 
bottle, but I am well made of good rubber, and 
do not leak, so my mistress always takes me on 
her travels. 

I am at this moment lying at her feet in the 
berth of a cabin on a Mediterranean steamer, 
on my homeward voyage from Syria, and am 
dictating to her by thought transference, some 
of my experiences in that distant land. 

The trip through Palestine is a hard one, and 
very serious and she is thinking of what a sad 
country it is; how the spirit of tragedy hov- 
ers over it, the tragedy of the present — Turk- 
ish misrule — and the terrible tragedy of the 
past ; but, personally I am thinking of my poor 
wrinkled skin. Will it ever get into shape 

73 



Mediterranean Idyls 



again? All the waters from Dan to Beersheba 
have helped to distend it, and I am almost worn 
out. 

I did not mind being used on the outgoing 
voyage of the Carmania, as the water with 
which I was filled was good, pure, common- 
place Croton water with no story to tell, and 
no lament to make. In Cairo I had a week's 
rest, the weather being warm. 

My troubles began on the voyage from Alex- 
andria to Joppa. Some drops inside me said 
that once they took this same trip around 
Joppa, inside a whale by the side of a man 
named Jonah, and that they preferred that 
mode of travel to the present one. I quite 
agreed with them. I am not accustomed to 
dirty little Oriental boats, nor to being put to 
bed in an engineer's cabin, all smelt up with 
rancid oil and stale cigarettes. However, I 
was in pretty good company, as an English 
lady of title occupied the room of Macchinista 
No. I, my mistress Macchinista No. II, and 
my master Macchinista No. Ill, surrounded 
by machinery and Mohammedans, veiled 
women lying around on old sacks asleep, their 

74 



Mediterranean Idyls 



fat Turkish husbands also asleep with one eye 
open and smelHng like fury. 

But I had no idea of what was awaiting 
me in the morning on landing. Being packed 
in a traveling case, I could neither see nor hear 
much, but luckily the case was wicker. I could 
peep between the basket-work, and get some 
slight notion of what was going on. In that 
way I saw tears rolling down the frightened 
face of a nice looking German lady, as she 
looked over the side of the ship. I could not 
imagine what on earth was the matter with her, 
till someone hfted me and I, too, looked over 
the side of the ship. The waves were terrible, 
the small boat on which we were to embark 
rose and fell till one moment it was at the foot 
of our ladder and the next at the head. Sud- 
denly I felt myself in midair. I almost went 
into the water, trunks very often do, but luck- 
ily was caught on the fly by the boatman. My 
master and mistress were also caught on the 
fly. A short but perilous trip soon brought 
us to shore at Joppa and I was carried to my 
room. There I learned very little, except that 
the room was named Judah. A text was over 

75 



Mediterranean Idyls 



each of the two doors, one in German, the 
other English: 

"Harken, Jehovah, to Judah's voice. 
And to his people bring him in." 

I learned afterwards that all the rooms on this 
corridor are named for the twelve tribes of 
Israel. You see, my mistress forgot to bring 
her Bible with her and it was not until she 
bought one in Jerusalem that I really knew 
what country I was traveling in. 

The next morning I was dreadfully fright- 
ened because a huge giant picked me up and 
walked off with me. This giant was six and 
a half feet tall. At first I thought it was Go- 
liath, but then I remembered once seeing a 
picture of Goliath with his head cut off, so I 
knew it couldn't be he. He was dressed in a 
beautiful Alice blue (you see, my mistress is 
an American) woolen shirt, embroidered by 
hand and a very full skirt of navy blue, 
also embroidered by hand. This skirt was 
gathered at the waist line and sewed up 
at the hem between the feet, so that it fitted 
tightly around the ankles and hung like 

76 



Mediterranean Idyls 



a bag between. Big pockets were concealed 
within the ample folds. I knew this for 
a fact, because once I was tucked in one 
of them, and often I saw my mistress' sketch 
kit down in their depths. A silk kerchief 
wedged on to his head with two heavy black 
rings completed his toilet and, except for his 
remarkable stature, I could not tell whether 
the wearer was man or woman. At first, when 
I heard people calling him Sallie, I made sure 
he was a woman and thought perhaps from 
her commanding air and sewed-up skirt, she 
might be one of those Suffragettes you hear 
so much of. 

I soon learned, however, from the way he 
bossed my little master and mistress (I call 
them little, because they looked like mere chil- 
dren beside this huge creature) that he was 
to be their guardian, dragoman, they call it 
there, all during their stay in Palestine. 

A five-hour journey on the railroad over the 
Plains of Sharon and the mountains of Judea, 
brought us up to Jerusalem, and then my trou- 
bles really began, for it was cold up there and 
my mistress needed me all the time. The wa- 

77 



Mediterranean Idyls 



ter with which she filled me was so uneasy, 
and wanted to talk to me so much about its old 
life, that I never had a moment's peace. I 
sighed for the quiet water of America that 
basks in the sunlight in great sheets all day 
long. 

All the water of Jerusalem is rain water, 
one moment whisked up into the clouds, the 
next dropped into the city, a sort of heaven 
and hell existence that must be very weari- 
some. When up above it looks down on a 
vast collection of gray roofs, each with its 
dome of cement or dried mud with flat space 
around for catching the rain and storing it. 
With few exceptions, these domes are imper- 
fect and as clumsily made as a child's mud 
house; in fact, the whole effect of architecture 
in Syria is that of having been made by child- 
ish fingers out of a lump of clay, of never hav- 
ing existed in the mind of the builder previous 
to its execution ; consequently the walls are sel- 
dom plumb, the rooms are often acute or 
obtuse-angled, the ceilings are tilted, and the 
fa9ade scarcely ever parallels the street. Look 
at a Turkish rug, you know it is hand-made, 

78 



Mediterranean Idyls 



because it is lop-sided; so it is with everything 
Turkish, even their clocks ! If I want to know 
the time in the night, I listen to the chimes in 
the tower outside my window. I count the 
strokes, either add or subtract six, then add ten 
minutes. For instance, it strikes seven times, 
and I know it is ten minutes past one, or it 
strikes four times and I know it is ten minutes 
past ten. 

There is another sound that comes from the 
towers of the city that is wonderfully beauti- 
ful and haunting, the call of the Mohammedans 
to prayer. It rings out upon the air with 
the clearness of some deep-toned bell. These 
towers or minarets help to relieve the genera] 
tone of ugliness. 

But to return to my drop of water in the 
cloud as it looks down upon the city. The 
streets — but there are no streets, only narrow 
alleys, through which no horse nor motor- 
driven vehicle has ever passed — are crooked 
and steep, upstairs and downstairs, and dark 
and nasty, and only washed when my little 
drop of water comes down with its comrades 
out of the clouds and rushes through their filth ; 

79 



Mediterranean Idyls 



or else becomes imprisoned in a pigskin hang- 
ing around a man's neck and is ejected from 
its mouth in a slight sprinkle. But when the 
sirocco blows up the street with its hot breath, 
all the little droj^s rush back to their cloud 
and stay there and the city is filled with dust. 

There is but one exception, aside from the 
minarets, to the general lack of plan or beauty 
— the Mosque of Omar — built on the site of 
Solomon's temple, the only spot in the whole 
vast city of Jerusalem in which one has a sense 
of well-being. There, one has a feeling of 
nicely adjusted space, of harmony, of balance 
and quiet, that is totally lacking elsewhere, and 
the rain loves to fall upon it and wash its beau- 
tiful gray dome, its blue tiles, and the immense 
tesselated clean pavement, on which it stands. 
Not a speck of dust, not a grain of sand, not 
a streak of mud is ever permitted on its smooth 
surface. It is up so high — the top of a lofty 
hill was leveled to make room for the original 
temple — that no dust can reach it, and no one 
is allowed to step upon it with uncovered shoe. 

One or two clumps of tall, black-green cy- 
presses give the dark notes that make the 

80 






THK HOl.V Sl.Pl'l.CHRl 



Mediterranean Idyls 



whole a picture, or so my mistress says. She 
sketched there one day, guarded carefully by 
Saleh, and my master, and an armed Kavass. 
Like Cinderella, she had to be out of it before 
the clock struck twelve, or dire things might 
have happened. The mosque is in the hands 
of the Moslem, and at twelve he prays. 

I can never rest for thinking of how this 
same rain has been falling alike upon the just 
and the unjust for, lo! these thousands of 
years. Some of the drops that lie within me 
tell me that they themselves fell upon the head 
of Solomon, as he stood on this very spot, su- 
perintending the building of his temple. Oth- 
ers remember a thousand years farther back 
and say they fell here upon Abraham, as he 
was about to offer up Isaac, and almost put 
the fire out. 

For two days in Jerusalem, my mistress 
stayed in bed with a grippy cold and I hugged 
up close to her. She could look out of her win- 
dow at David's Tower and the Joppa Gate. 
I heard someone tell her that not a person had 
been driven through that narrow gate since the 
old days of the Roman chariots until the Ger- 

81 



Mediterranean Idyls 



man Emperor's visit a few years ago, when it 
was torn down so that he might pass through 
in a carriage. 

Lady L. came in to say good-by and brought 
her a bell from Jericho. She is a good woman 
as well as a pretty lady and she is going back 
to her estate in England, feeling a weight of 
responsibility for having been given this op- 
portunity of visiting the Holy Land. I fear 
my mistress is not as good as she, for she says 
all the Holy Spots seem to be so unrehable and 
so covered up with ugly churches and paper 
flowers and dirty tinsel, that she can't make 
herself feel, and it is only out-of-doors that the 
Old Story comes back to her. 

Even in Bethlehem — Saleh always called it 
Bedlime — the memory of the Jew shopkeeper, 
where she bought the Bethlehem robe, seemed 
to shut out everything else — he was ugly and 
dirty and kept calling her "Mother." When 
you think it was Queen Helena, the mother of 
Constantine, who made the first attempt at lo- 
cating these Spots, and that as much time had 
already elapsed as has with us since the dis- 
covery of America, no wonder the site of the 

82 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Holy Sepulcher is so much in dispute. Queen 
Helena thought the world was flat and that the 
sepulcher was upon the exact center. But the 
ride through the country to Bethlehem was ap- 
pealing, even though the carriage did jolt over 
the unspeakably bad road. It was the land of 
Ruth and Naomi and Rachel, of the three wise 
men and their guiding star. Myriads of tiny 
wild flowers lifted their little heads trying to 
brighten this tragic land. Now and then Da- 
vid would go by — his home was in Bethlehem 
— leading his goats and playing on his harp: 
only now his harp was a cane whistle. 

Gray-bearded old Tolstois came trudging 
merrily along the road with their wives and 
friends, hundreds of them, swathed in thick 
garments, staff in hand. They had walked all 
the way from Russia, joined en route by other 
pilgrims from Hungary, Germany, Rou- 
mania, Greece, planning to spend Easter in 
Jerusalem. I should think their lips would 
have been worn out, or else full of microbes, for 
they kissed every dirty spot that was pointed 
out to them. But their hearty sincerity was a 
delight to behold. 



Mediterranean Idyls 



The next day we drove down to Jericho and 
spent the night, and there it was nice and 
warm, being so deep down in the bowels of the 
earth, the deepest down place in the whole 
world. If the sea had broken through its 
mountain boundary, my mistress would have 
been drowned beneath thirteen hundred feet of 
water. Notwithstanding it was so pleasantly 
warm, my mistress filled me just the same. 
Ah! then it was I heard tales, for the water 
within me was taken from the River Jordan, 
just before it empties into the Dead Sea. 
Such a dramatic little river as the Jordan 
is from start to finish. Some of the drops 
not long since were snow on Mount Hermon, 
where the birth of the Jordan takes place. 
They had pitched themselves down from its 
dizzy height of nine thousand feet, rippled 
merrily through the bright little Sea of Galilee, 
twisted in and out of high, weird clay cliffs, 
becoming more and more tawny as they licked 
their clay banks, and had at last tumbled ig- 
nominiously into the salty depths of the Dead 
Sea, a prison from which there is no escape, 
except by evaporation. The river is only sixty 

84* 



Mediterranean Idyls 



miles from its birth to its death, as the crow 
flies, but it has prolonged its existence to three 
times that by meandering. 

Some drops were there when the river was 
parted to let the Children of Israel walk over 
dry shod ; they said it was awful holding their 
breath so long. 

I should think the Children would have been 
disappointed after waiting so many years, if 
the Promised Land appeared then as it does 
now, a gray, barren landscape looking as if 
some imp had thrown rocks at it and broken it 
to bits, leaving his dirty tools lying around 
everywhere, no trees, no grass — just mountain- 
ous desolation. No wonder they longed for 
the fleshpots of Egypt. The land does not flow 
with milk and honey, only big Jericho oranges 
measuring sixteen inches round (mostly rind) . 
But then, of course, all the people who started 
from Egypt and remembered its beauty were 
dead. These were their children and grand- 
children, who only knew the gray desert, so I 
suppose anything looked pretty good to them 
after that. 

One drop of water within me came from 
86 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the Dead Sea. It said it was lots of fun in the 
Dead Sea, for every day so many of them rose 
up into the clouds, six and a half million tons — 
there was no other place for them to go, for 
the sea has no outlet and rises but little, 
and the river keeps tumbling in. No birds and 
no fish can live there, it is so salty. 

My people were disappointed in the Dead 
Sea; it didn't look dead at all and not a bit 
mysterious, but just a simple, quiet little lake, 
reflecting blue, barren hills, with "Nebo's 
lonely mountain" peeping its head up in the 
distance. Poor old Moses! he didn't miss 
much, but still it was too bad. 

My mistress made a sketch of what is called 
the Mount of Temptation. I suppose things 
looked more tempting around the base of it 
then than they do now, or Satan wouldn't have 
selected that particular spot. 

The Governor of Jerusalem and the Sheik 
of Bethlehem sat at table that evening along 
with a Greek monk and several other queer peo- 
ple. The Governor was a fine-looking speci- 
men with the typically Turkish face, long and 
narrow, and dark eyes set close together. The 

86 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Sheik was so muffled up it was hard to tell 
much about him, except that he looked fat and 
dirty. 

We drove back to Jerusalem the next morn- 
ing and made arrangements to leave the fol- 
lowing day for a week's driving trip north, for 
which I was devoutly thankful, as some drops 
kept clamoring to tell me of the terrible trage- 
dies that had occurred in tliis dreadful city so 
many years ago ; how the very men who cruci- 
fied Jesus were themselves crucified during the 
siege by the Romans, till there was no more 
wood left with which to build crosses. The 
drops say they, themselves, were directly re- 
sponsible for the final destruction of Jerusa- 
lem, for if they could have continued falling 
into the Pool of Siloam, as had been their wont 
since the world began, thirst would not have 
caused the inhabitants to succumb. Some- 
thing kept them back, so the Pool dried up for 
the first time in history. 

I would not listen to anything more, for I 
was beginning to get very limp and sad, and 
I was glad when my mistress poured all those 
dismal drops out of me and packed me in the 

87 



Mediterranean Idyls 



wicker suitcase to leave Jerusalem forever. 

As it looked like rain, a carriage with sta- 
tionary top was provided, with the inevitable 
three horses, two horses keeping in the middle 
of the road, the third getting a footing in any- 
old place, sometimes down in the ditch, some- 
times up on the hillside. 

The drive down from Jerusalem was in- 
tensely dramatic, dropping, dropping all the 
forenoon. Zigzagging along the edge of 
macadam-like hills, we could see our road many 
times repeated in terraces down below us. We 
stopped for lunch at a well, beside which a fair 
Rebecca was washing clothes in a scarlet plush 
dress. My mistress tried to sketch her, but 
she would not pose, for fear her husband would 
find it out and beat her. 

After lunch we rode to a fertile valley, our 
first glimpse of anything fertile since coming 
to Palestine. Wonderful crops of grain ex- 
tended as far as the eye could reach. "Some 
seed fell on stony ground, some on good 
ground, where tares came up and choked 
them." For fear of this last catastrophe, the 
tares were being pulled out by young girls, 

88 



Mediterranean Idyls 



half concealed in the growing grain; it was a 
pretty sight. In the division of the land 
among the twelve tribes, I do not think they 
fared at all equally. Judah got barren hills, 
Benjamin stony ground, but Ephraim seems 
to have been the lucky one, all this fertile land 
falling to him. 

As evening approached, we reached the town 
of Shechem. Shechem was old when David 
was a boy. It was then a town of refuge, 
criminals fleeing from pursuit could claim pro- 
tection while awaiting trial. It is now a fa- 
natical Mohanmiedan village, containing the 
Samaritan sect, and som.ewhat unsafe for 
Christians, so my people decided to camp out 
in a dirty damp place beneath the city walls, 
through which an irrigating ditch ran. Tents, 
lined with Oriental patchwork, had already 
been pitched, supper was ready in the dining 
tent, and my people settled themselves for a 
good night's rest, but, alas ! the dogs ! All the 
homeless dogs — and all the dogs of the Turk- 
ish Empire are homeless — found their way to 
our camp, and made night hideous. These 
dogs have jackal blood in them and inherit 

89 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the night-prowling, day-sleeping habits of their 
ancestors, as well as their coarse yellow hair. 

The next day it rained, a cold miserable rain, 
and my master and mistress stayed in their tent 
all day long with their feet tucked in bed 
against my warm back, reading the Bible I 
Saleh made them buy a Bible in Jerusalem, 
and every night he gave them a lesson to read. 
The next morning he would scold them good 
and hard if they had not done so. 

He himself knew the whole Book by heart 
and just where everything was to be found 
from the first verse of Genesis to the last verse 
of Revelations. So there they sat in the tent 
in the rain, taking turns reading aloud in the 
Old Testament about the father who swore to 
sacrifice the first thing that met him on his 
arrival at Shechem as a thank offering for his 
success in war, and his beautiful daughter had 
to pay the penalty; about the two mountains, 
the Mount of Blessing and the Mount of Curs- 
ing. Our tent was just between the two. 
Saleh knew every time the word Shechem oc- 
curred in the Bible, New Testament as well as 
Old, and he made them read each one. That 

90 



..fc!F'^5<»;g!,.s-> 










I'M— -^--.M. 



Mediterranean Idyls 



night he encompassed us about many times for 
fear the high wind would blow the tent down. 

The next day Saleh and my master and mis- 
tress started off in their carriage in the rain, 
alas! alas I leaving me behind, forgotten and 
forlorn. I tried to scream, but, tucked away 
there in the blankets, I could make no sound. 
I wriggled and wriggled and at last fell out 
and rolled under the bed, but they were gone. 
Hardly half an hour had elapsed before the 
driver of their carriage came running back, in- 
quiring for me, bedclothes were thrown aside, 
but no one thought of looking under the bed 
and I was once more deserted. I was so un- 
happy the water within me turned cold and 
oozed through. 

After I had cried myself to sleep I woke the 
next morning to find two ladies in my tent. 
They did not like the place one bit, it was so 
damp and cold and sewery. I soon found they 
had brought some of my kinfolk with them, 
two nice American hot-water bottles. The 
three of us got into quite a heated discussion 
about the relative merits of the different wa- 
ters of Palestine. The ladies' dragoman 

91 



Mediterranean Idyls 



proved to be a couisn of Saleh's. His name 
was Tewfik. 

Someone told Tewfik where I belonged, so 
he tucked me in his pocket, and brought me to 
Saleh at Haifa. 

On the way a drop of water that had lin- 
gered behind when the rest was poured out, 
told me we were actually passing Jacob's Well. 
It knew because it had been in the well at the 
time Jacob drew water and had seen him court- 
ing Sarah. 

The drop had no desire to return, however, 
for an ugly Greek Church is being built on top 
of the well and, as incense is always swinging 
over it, the little drops that used to cool the 
parched lips of the wayfarer are almost stifled 
down there in the dark. 

We spent one night at Zamarin, the only 
clean village in Syria, and that is clean only 
because it is owned by Europeans. Rou- 
manian Jews bought the whole place and its 
surroundings from the Bedouins, and built the 
village, a truly Promised Land, which would 
have given the children of Israel reason for re- 
joicing, could they have seen it — a lovely fer- 

92 



Mediterranean Idyls 



tile country, green hills, and trees, actually 
trees, with a glimpse of the Mediterranean in 
the distance. 

Tewfik told his ladies that the only way the 
people had been able to build their village was 
thus : the Turkish Government refused to give 
them permits to build houses, as they were 
not Mohammedans; at the same time they 
could not tear a house down once it was roofed 
in, so complete roofs were imported from Eu- 
rope and laid on the ground; then they built 
houses under them ! You see, Tewfik talked to 
his people more in the line of politics and not 
so much about the Bible as Saleh. 

I stayed in Tewfik's pocket, and the next 
morning drove on with them through an unin- 
teresting, undramatic flat country. Soon our 
road entirely disappeared and we drove at will 
over the meadows and across lots, all well-culti- 
vated farm lands. 

At last we reached Haifa, and I was once 
more restored to my mistress, to her great joy. 
Do you know, she had actually tried to replace 
me? But the only hot-water bottle she could 
find in Haifa was a yard long and held a ton! 

93 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Haifa is beautiful, right on the Mediter- 
ranean, under the shadow of Mount Carmel. 
Coming here by carriage road from Zamarin, 
one loses all that is associated with the old He- 
brew History; that is gained only by keeping 
to the bridle paths over the mountains. Some 
friends of my mistress, an English clergyman 
and his young wife, were traveling that way 
and we were constantly coming up with them. 
They told us all about it, how they drank cof- 
fee in the same kind of a house as that in which 
the Virgin Mary had lived, pigs, children and 
people, all in one room, but quite clean, half the 
floor being elevated about three feet, human 
beings sleeping on the higher portion, animals 
on the lower. This hut belonged to a family 
of Druses, and, in spite of their dreadful repu- 
tation, they found them amiable and hospitable. 
The Druses are a sect of warlike mountaineers, 
who are causing much trouble with the authori- 
ties just at present. Every week some of 
them are being hung in Damascus. My mis- 
tress' husband bought a postcard on which were 
pictures of the bodies of some who had been 
hung just the week before we arrived there. 

94. 



Mediterranean Idyls 



From Haifa to Nazareth the drive is again 
associated with old Bible scenes. I learned a 
good deal about it, as the water with which 
I was filled came from Mary's Well. It was 
brought to me in a jar balanced on a maiden's 
head, just as Mary herself used to carry it. 
My mistress sketched at the well at sunset 
and dreamed of the old, old scenes. That 
night the drops talked to themselves about the 
past, for some of them had been in the well 
when Mary herself drew water. 

After Nazareth we began dropping again 
into the bowels of the earth. Here, as before, 
the farmer was tilling the ground, but such 
soil! A sower went forth to sow, some seed 
fell on stony ground, but how could it do oth- 
erwise ? It was all stony, great orange-colored 
stones as big as your head, that the wooden 
plow could hardly push to one side. The 
farmer with his long flowing skirts, head tied 
up as though he had the mumps, found great 
difficulty in steering it. Shepherds tended 
their flocks of goats in stiff, thick kimona- 
shaped garments hand-woven of goats' hair. 
A heavy double black ring encircled the head, 

95 



Mediterranean Idyls 



pressing close the kerchief beneath it. My 
mistress afterwards bought a similar outfit at 
Damascus. They saw David again while they 
were lunching in an olive grove en route to the 
Sea of Galilee. This time he had his sling 
with him and wanted backsheesh for throwing 
a stone, but when my mistress' husband offered 
to buy the sling itself no amount of money 
would induce him to part with it. 

At the first glimpse of the Sea of Gahlee my 
mistress stopped the carriage and sat there 
in the intense heat by the side of the road 
to sketch. Snow-capped Mount Hermon, the 
birthplace of the Jordan, poked its head up in 
the distance, the sea, a beautiful little hill- 
encircled lake, lay far below us, on its left 
shore, the field, now being plowed for the com- 
ing grain, where the miracle of the loaves and 
fishes took place. Heavily laden camels 
wound down the road, shepherds with their 
string of black goats dotted the hillside, and 
everything spoke of peace and good will to 
man. 

That night when I was filled with water 
from the Sea of Galilee, good, sweet, pure, 

96 



Mediterranean Idyls 



clean water, I was better pleased than I had 
been heretofore with any of the waters of Pales- 
tine. They had a pretty tale to tell. They 
said that every morning at dawn, a lady 
came down to the shore and painted. She had 
been doing so for three years and was as 
one inspired, so they arrayed themselves in 
the hues of the sunrise for her benefit, pale, 
quiet, opalescent colors, fit background for the 
risen Christ and his disciples. My mistress 
saw her work afterwards and found it good. 
The finished picture is to be painted on the 
walls of a prison in Connecticut. The pris- 
oners themselves have contributed towards it 
and are looking forward eagerly to its comple- 
tion. In the meantime the painter is living in 
a native hut in the old town of Tiberias, seven 
hundred feet below the level of the sea, through 
the intense heat of three winters and the 
scorching, insect -infested heat of three sum- 
mers. She has made studies of all the dif- 
erent types of Jews, and they are many. She 
has no companions, only her thoughts and her 
art. When she saw my mistress sketching she 
spoke to her and invited her to her mudhouse 

97 



Mediterranean Idyls 



studio. It was a weird little procession that 
wound its way that evening down the narrow 
streets of Tiberias, Saleh carrying the lantern, 
and turned in and up a flight of crooked mud 
stairs to the queer little chamber built with its 
two levels, as I described the hut in which the 
Virgin Mary had lived. Hundreds of life- 
sized studies of a high order of composition 
and execution stood tilted against the mud 
walls, but they all fell into insignificance be- 
fore the heaven-inspired picture that is grow- 
ing out of them. I heard my mistress con- 
gratulate Miss Cowles with her whole heart 
and soul. 

That morning my people had planned a 
trip to the ruins of Capernaum, but the calm 
little lake had turned into a raging sea and it 
was impossible to embark. However, by noon 
it had gotten over its fit of temper and was 
once more smiling. The boat was large and it 
took four men to row it. Coming home a 
breeze sprang up, sails were hoisted and they 
just flew back. My mistress was quite badly 
frightened, the wind blew so hard and she re- 
membered the dreadful tales she had heard 

98 



Mediterranean Idyls 



that morning of what the little sea could do. 
She said she didn't blame Peter for being 
frightened that day when he was out fishing. 

We fared better than the little steamer, 
however, for besides the passengers getting 
wet, the dragomans had a quarrel on board, 
which came pretty near upsetting the boat. 
A certain Sir Somebody and his family, who 
happened to be on board the steamer, had an 
incompetent obnoxious little Armenian for his 
dragoman, who told him in their presence that 
all Syrians were cut-throats and thieves and 
robbers. Saleh, Tewfik, and the others were 
Syrians, and naturally resented it, so after 
that, Sir Somebody in spite of the fact that he 
is Premier of a big country and was on his way 
to the Coronation by special invitation, fared 
pretty badly — Armenians are extremely un- 
popular in Syria. 

At the table that evening sat the Governor 
of Tiberias — he had been in prison for three 
years, but with the change of administration 
had been released by the Young Turks. 

The sea was calm enough the next morning 
when we sailed across it to take the train for 

99 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Damascus. I was lucky, for the very day 
after that the water was so rough it ran into 
all the traveling bags and made the contents 
look like Joseph's coat of many colors. 

I have traveled on many trains with my 
mistress, but never on anything like this 
Hajdj one (the word rhymes with judges). 
Haj means pilgrim, and this road was built 
by the Turkish Government for the ex- 
press purpose of carrying pilgrims to Mecca. 
The engine could not budge the train, unless 
it backed down and started all over again, and 
it was not until it had slipped off three coaches 
that it made any headway at all, and then it 
went so near the edge of crumbling precipices 
and over such narrow bridges climbing the 
steep mountains, it would have made my hair 
stand on end if I had had any; as it was my 
skin all shriveled up and I did not blame the 
big English Colonel for being so nervous and 
frightened. 

At last we arrived at Damascus and driving 
like mad for half an hour over rough stony 
streets full of holes, like all Turkish streets, 
reached our hotel in the oldest inhabited city 

100 



Mediterranean Idyls 



in the world. 

I had all my life heard of Damascus. 
Saleh was always saying — "wait till you get 
to Damascus before you buy" — the very word 
was full of imagery and romance. It conjured 
up visions of Arabian nights, hanging gardens, 
purple and fine linen, Cedars of Lebanon, 
royal silks, rich carpets, seductive perfumes, 
steel blades, but — the reality! If Jerusalem 
was childishly planned, what of Damascus? 
Not one redeeming feature, too sordid to be 
picturesque, too ugly to be paintable. Of 
course, there were gardens, or rather fruit or- 
chards, outside the city, but they were hidden 
behind ten-foot-high mud walls. As for buy- 
ing, there was nothing to tempt one, unless 
perhaps it was some of the jeweled daggers, 
part of the loot taken from the seraglio of the 
deposed Sultan, Abdul Hamid, in Constan- 
tinople. 

The only interesting thing my mistress saw 
was the interior of a private house; imagine 
driving through a noisome alley in the tene- 
ment district of New York, opening a filthy 
door, and finding yourself in a marble court of 

101 



Mediterranean Idyls 



flowers and fountains, the mistress in a soiled 
Mother Hubbard, with hair hanging down her 
back in two untidy braids — alas I for dreams 
and romance! As in the poorer houses, the 
floor of the room was on two levels, the 
upper level carpeted, with a divan running 
around three sides, and no other furnishing 
except a cheap colored print tacked very high 
up on the wall. The bathroom had no plumb- 
ing, no tub, no modern conveniences — simply 
a faucet and a hole in the floor. 

My mistress made a sketch of the distant 
snow-clad mountains from the balcony of her 
room. I managed to peep out from my basket 
at the view. I saw two tall minarets marking 
the spot where a kind lady serves dinner to the 
poor every day. I saw a brown river, its swift 
current confined between mathematical banks 
running parallel with the street, and I won- 
dered what story that water would have to tell. 
I soon found out, and such merry little drops 
they were! They had been snow not long 
since and had come tumbling down from 
the nearby Lebanons, rushing as fast as 
they could to the warm country for fear they 

10^ 



Mediterranean Idyls 



would be turned into snow again on the way. 
They had not much to tell — long, long ago 
they had seen men at work cutting cedar trees 
for Solomon's temple — they knew a little about 
the visit of the Romans, but that was all. 

My people stayed in Damascus two days in- 
stead of three and wished it had been one day 
instead of two, especially when they arrived at 
Baalbec after a five-hour railroad journey. 

This railroad was built by the French. On 
its way to the seacoast town of Bey rout, from 
which port my people were planning to sail 
for home, it crosses two ranges of mountains, 
the Lebanons and the Anti-Lebanons. All 
winter heavy snow had prevented trains from 
running. As it was, my mistress reached her 
hand out of the window and made snowballs. 
While waiting at a station near Baalbec, she 
made a sketch of the Anti-Lebanons to the 
great delight of the little Syrian children who 
kept muttering "Gebel, Gebel," meaning 
"mountain, mountain." 

Between these two big ranges lies the temple 
of Baalbec, the old Heliopohs of the Romans. 
Even then we were nearly four thousand feet 

103 



Mediterranean Idyls 



above the sea. You can see I was being 
whisked about a good deal, one day down in the 
hot bowels of the earth, the next on the cold 
heights of the sky, no wonder my mistress 
needed me. 

Baalbec was the climax of our whole trip. 
Saleh did not like it because the temple was 
built by heathens and he could not quote 
Scripture, but to my people it was the place 
of which dreams are made. 

From our window that day we saw a vision 
of beauty, such beauty as is seldom vouchsafed 
to man to behold — snow-clad mountains sil- 
houetted against a delicate sky ; carved columns 
of an old ruin, the finest old Roman ruin in the 
world, silhouetted against the mountains; 
thousands of fruit trees in full bloom — two tall 
black green cypresses. 

What more could the traveler desire for his 
last memory picture of Syria? And beyond 
those snow-clad mountains still stand the Ce- 
dars — the same Cedars of Lebanon that were 
old when Christ was a baby. 

"Nor was any tree in the Garden of God 
like unto it in beauty. All the birds of heaven 

104 



Mediterranean Idyls 



made their nests in its boughs, and under its 
branches did all the beasts of the field bring 
forth their young. The rivers thereof ran 
round about it. The waters nourished it" — 
the waters whose drops have murmured this 
tale to me. 



105 




FOURTH IDYL 

IN THE SILENCES OF NORTH 
AFRICA 



AS TOLD BY ANOTHER BELL 



IN THE SILENCES OF NORTH 
AFRICA 




^v y^HEN my foster sister, the 

\ / Spanish bell, returned to 

I ^ Jf America and told me of the 
ly^^5K| wonderful trip she had had in 
Spain, standing on the radi- 
ator of the automobile, how 
she had talked with so many 
bells and heard of so many interesting things, 
I was filled with envy. 

Both of us have been cast in molds shaped 
like women, only she is much prettier and more 
aristocratic-looking than I, with her court train, 
her pompadour hair, mantilla and fan. I am 
inclined to be short and dumpy. 

Poor, proud little lady! She met with an 
untoward fate soon after her return to her own 
home. After surviving all those thousands of 
miles of travel in the Mediterranean Penin- 
sula, she fell from her perch one rainy day and 
was never heard of more. Where is she, I 

109 



Mediterranean Idyls 



wonder? Is she in some agreeable home, or is 
she ground down deep in the mud? ''Requi- 
escat in pace/' poor little lady bell. 

It is an ill-wind that blows no one any good, 
so although I felt very sorry for the untimely 
disappearance of my dear sister, I was glad 
when Frederico the chauffeur screwed me onto 
the radiator in her place, and whispered in my 
ear that I was to go with him on the Mediter- 
ranean voyage to North Africa. 

I remembered how much my sister had suf- 
fered from cold and wind with only a mantilla 
and fan to shut out the icy blasts, so I was glad 
that in casting me, my creators had provided 
me with a good warm shawl and hood. I cer- 
tainly needed them both for although the 
hymn-books tell us that "Afric's sunny foun- 
tains roll down their golden sand," I failed to 
find either the gold or the sun. I often en- 
vied my mistress her fur coat which she con- 
stantly wore even inside the closed-up land- 
aulet. But poor me! I had to stand out in 
the rain and snow and sleet all the time, I tried 
not to think of my comfortable steam-heated 
home in America. 

110 




STREET IX TUNIS 



3Iediterranean Idyls 



You may perhaps be surprised at my men- 
tion of snow in Africa, but once we climbed a 
mountain and went through a cedar forest 
every limb of which was heavily laden with a 
foot of snow. The top of the automobile had 
been pushed back and when we accidentally 
brushed against a branch, an avalanche filled 
the car. 

The scene is one of those perfect pictures of 
which I will always carry the remembrance — 
the sunset background, the green plain 
stretching many feet below us with its ribbons 
of rivers twisting towards the sun, the snow- 
clad forest gray against the yellow light, the 
silence of complete isolation, the haunting fear 
that perhaps we had taken the wi'ong turn 
and would have to retrace our steps and slide 
down those horrible, slippery, skiddy curves 
which we had just come up — all combined to 
make an unforgettable picture. 

My mistress still wears the tiny golden bell 
which tinkles to me as it did to my sister, keep- 
ing me posted as to what happens when I am 
not along. I don't know what I should have 
done without that little voice, for I was far 

111 



Mediterranean Idyls 



more lonesome in Africa than she ever was in 
Spain. 

You see she found so many friends every- 
where, bells and belfries being the chief fea- 
tures of the landscape. It was a great disap- 
pointment to me to travel so far in utter silence 
and never hear the faintest j ingle. Even where 
there were minarets there were no bells ; there 
was not even the haunting sound of the call to 
prayer. Since the French occupation, except 
in Kairouan, this has been forbidden and only a 
flag flying from the tower tells the devout Mo- 
hammedan when to pray. Perhaps this ac- 
counts for the total lack of the prayerful at- 
mosphere and feeling of reverence that my mis- 
tress has found in all other countries which 
follow the precepts of the Prophet. 

One day we stopped for lunch in the most 
beautiful gorge you could possibly imagine. 
This is another high point memory picture. 
My people were busy eating, but I just 
feasted my eyes on pure loveliness. A moun- 
tain had been cleft in two by the pressure 
of a roaring cataract. Luxuriant vegetation 
clothed its sides. Now and then a gray mon- 

112 



Mediterranean Idyls 



key could be seen springing from limb to limb. 

One of the finest roads it has ever been my 
fortune to travel upon has been built out of a 
lip of the precipice. Suddenly I heard a wel- 
come sound, the jangle of bells! Although 
they were only mule bells, my little brass heart 
leaped for joy and I tried to convey the mes- 
sage to my mistress. Whereupon she bought 
the whole outfit — there were twenty of them 
riveted on a cornucopia of leather — from the 
unwilling and astonished driver. 

Frederico strapped them to the side of the 
car and after that I did not feel a bit lone- 
some. In fact I began to take a keen interest 
in everything so that I would have just as 
much to tell when I should arrive home as my 
sister had. Contrary to the plan pursued by 
her in relating her adventures, I am going to 
begin backward. 

My mistress once heard a German waiter 
speak of the endest of a row of tables so I am 
going to begin with the endest city we visited 
— Kairouan in Tunisia. It is a holy city in 
the IMohammedan sense. My people made 
most strenuous efforts to arrive there early on 

113 



Mediterranean Idyls 



a Friday morning, as Friday is the Moham- 
medan Sabbath. 

But before I go any further you must be 
introduced to the guide whom my mistress' 
husband thought it necessary to engage. As 
soon as I saw him, and I am only a bell, I 
recognized him for a fool, but I did not realize 
what an absolute fool he was till afterwards. 
His name is, but never mind, it sounds like 
Suet Pudding Man, and so we nicknamed him 
and later abbreviating that to S. P. M. If 
ever there was a chance for a wrong turn, he 
always took it. 

Thus we found ourselves after a good many 
miles of motoring not at Kairouan but at El 
Djem in almost the opposite direction to that 
which we had intended. 

El Djem is interesting in that it contains 
the magnificent ruins of a Colosseum almost as 
big as the one in Home; but if we were to see 
the holy city that day no time was to be lost at 
El Djem. So, reluctantly turning our backs 
upon it we at last arrived at Kairouan but, 
alas! too late for the Sabbath Day celebration. 

The S. P. M. tried to make up for it by giv- 
114 



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y. 



%^. 



/"■'' , 



'iit*.-^ 



X 



s 



r 



(S 



»-* ^ 



ji 



' / \ 



IN CHET.MA. THE VENICE OK THE DESERT 



Mediterranean Idyls 



ing my mistress a donkey ride to the various 
mosques and arranging for her to see a snake 
charmer. 

To do the latter, she had to chmb up a pitch- 
dark stairway leading into a room full of 
Arabs. Frescoes of curious beasts were 
painted upon the walls. Coffee of course was 
served. Then she went out upon the roof-top 
and there in the brilliant sunshine witnessed a 
holj^ performance by a snake charmer. Three 
snakes reared up their heads, flattening them 
out in some peculiar manner till they looked 
like fishes standing on long tails. 

They watched their master eat up part of 
another snake, chewing off big chunks as if he 
thoroughly enjoyed it. A fourth snake bit 
him on the nose till it bled. Then he threaded 
poniards through his cheek and neck, and 
danced, shaking his long, scanty, wet hair to 
the music of drums and tomtoms and bagpipes. 
Frederico said it was worse than seeing a bull 
fight. 

Of course it was impossible for me to attend 
this holy performance, because I was fastened 
to the automobile outside which was being 

115 



Mediterranean Idyls 



closely watched by an Arab boy. The little 
bell told me all about it when we were once 
more en route towards the hotel at Sousse. 
Many camels passed us that day, some hitched 
up to carts, so tall that the shafts were lifted 
right up in the air, some carrying immense 
loads of pottery glancing golden in the sun- 
shine, some with whole families on their backs. 
The haughty creatures never vouchsafed me a 
look but just stuck out their lower lips in a 
prideful sort of way as if they had been used to 
automobiles all their lives. 

Speaking of camels reminds me of one of 
the queerest experiences a motor party ever 
had. 

North Africa is a country of magnificent 
distances. Often fifty miles would be covered 
without passing through a single possible vil- 
lage. This experience occurred during one of 
these long stretches. Suddenly, and without 
warning, the automobile stopped. Investiga- 
tion showed that we had run entirely out of 
gasoline. It was about four in the afternoon. 
A herd of camels was just passing, led by a 
much berobed, barelegged Ai^ab. 

116 



Mediterranean Idyls 



The S. P. M. stopped him and made known 
our predicament, asking if it was possible to 
hitch some camels to the automobile and pull 
it to the nearest town, some twenty miles 
distant. All the Arabs w^e encountered could 
speak a httle French. He replied that they 
cou]d carry but not hitch! He was about to 
command four camels to kneel down so that the 
huge limousine might be lifted to their backs 
and I had visions of myself swaying in the air 
as I had seen the palanquins of the women 
sway on camelback! 

A little way up the road lived a French road- 
mender, but he had no gasoline. Frederico 
tried emptying the kerosene lamps into the car 
but in vain — the automobile could not run on 
kerosene, so the only thing to do was to send 
the S. P. M. and the Arab on camels to ride 
the twenty miles to El Kef and patiently await 
their return which of course meant an all night 
job and perhaps several nights. The place in 
which we were stranded was so remote there 
was not the slightest chance of encountering 
an automobile, a team of horses, or a yoke of 
oxen. Only camels and Arabs seemed to use 

117 



Mediterranean Idyls 



this road. I was scared to death for fear of 
some wandering nomads coming along and rob- 
bing my people. Near Biskra they had been 
told to avoid lonesome places after nightfall 
and I didn't know but there might be danger 
here too. I was better off than my mistress, 
however, for a bell doesn't have to eat. I 
couldn't help wondering what she was going 
to do about her supper. Finally Frederico 
braved the wrath of the wild Kabyle dog at the 
road-mender's hut and asked the wife if she 
would cook them some supper which she very 
kindly consented to do. My mistress took care 
of her two-weeks-old-baby while she prepared 
the meal. Just as they were sitting down to 
the table and speculating as to how far the 
S. P. M. had gone, who should walk in but the 
very man himself carrying two leaky cans of 
absolutely useless kerosene. "But where are 
the camels?" they all cried. 

"The camels they went away," he answered. 
I had seen him when he started and had 
watched the camel stop to nibble at each tuft of 
grass on the roadside. Every time he nibbled 
he knelt down and as the bits of grass were on 

118 



f 



r 



i 



^i\ 



¥ 

i 



OI.D ROMAN RUINS AT TIMGAD 



Mediterranean Idyls 



both sides of the road the progress was rather a 
zigzagging one, and I had fears of a week's 
stay in this lonesome place. Luckily, the auto- 
mobile was near enough the hut for me to peep 
in the window. 

Any woman would have been interested in 
seeing the way the road-mender's wife pre- 
pared her infant for bed. In the first place 
it had on a little black woolen shirt which she 
did not take off. Its lower garments were 
nothing but long, straight lengths of heavy, 
unbleached cotton, which she turned up over 
its legs and fastened with a big roll of surgical 
bandage, winding it round and round its little 
body till it looked like a mummy, and I don't 
see how it could draw a long breath. My 
mistress thought of the pictures she had seen 
in Italy of the Bambino. Then the mother 
washed a big glass which looked like a lemon- 
ade squeezer and placing it over her breast gave 
the child nourishment through it. 

My mind was somewhat diverted by watch- 
ing all these things through the window, so 
different from anything in America, but all 
the time I was longing to get started. "The 

119 



Mediterranean Idyls 



camels, they went away!" I could hear that 
voice all night long. 

Just as I was beginning to give up hope, 
what should I hear but the faint tinkle of a 
bicycle bell! How I longed for my tongue 
that I might ring aloud for help. However it 
proved to be our friend, the road-mender, re- 
turning from his tour of inspection. He 
brought the bicycle into the hut and at the 
sight my people who had just finished supper 
pounced upon it and with the promise of an 
ample reward, engaged the all-night services 
of bicycle and man for a trip to El Kef. Be- 
fore leaving, he provided them with a lamp, so 
all four sat in the automobile till 3:30 A. M. 
It w^as a weird experience, a bright starlight 
night in the middle of Tunisia, not a thing to 
be seen but the long, white road and flat, arid 
country extending without a break as far as 
the eye could reach to the far distant moun- 
tains. Not a sound to be heard except (and 
that could hardly be called a sound, it was so 
soft and still) the padded footsteps of a pass- 
ing camel carrying a tall, muffled Arab on its 
back. It would loom up out of the distance, 

120 



Mediterranean Idyls 



a silhouette against a starlit sky and pass like 
a veritable ship in the night. Now and then 
the savage barking of the Kabyle dog would 
bring terror and at the same time a sense of 
safety to our hearts. My people dozed a 
little, the S. P. JM. snored, but all night long 
I stood up on the radiator with wide open eyes 
looking, looking. At last the welcome lights 
of an approaching carriage were to be seen. 
It was the road-mender with gasohne. 

When we arrived at the dirty little Italian 
hotel at El Kef an hour before dawn, my peo- 
ple wished they had spent the rest of the night 
in the car! 

This happened on the eleventh of March on 
the return journey from Tunis to Algiers. 
My mistress did not like Tunis. It was flat, 
monotonous, ugly and windy; when it was not 
dusty, it was muddy. She thought it ought to 
have been called Tourist, it was so infested by 
that species of human being. I heard her say 
if she had been in John Howard Payne's place 
when he was consul there for ten years she, 
too, could have written "Home, Sweet Home." 

Perhaps her impressions were somewhat af- 
121 



Mediterranean Idyls 



fected by the death and burial of the young 
English officer, whom she had remembered as 
being so jolly and bright back in Algiers. 
The funeral was at 7 A. M. It was very cold 
and very sad. My people were the only 
strangers present. 

The old Phoenicians understood better than 
the present inhabitants how to locate a town. 
Instead of placing it in the low, marshy, ma- 
laria infested flats of Tunis, they went upon a 
hill nearby, commanding a superb view of the 
Mediterranean, like unto the Bay of Naples, 
and there built Carthage. My mistress would 
like to have stayed on the site and dreamed a 
bit of that proud old city of which scarcely a 
trace remains, but motorists must needs move 
on. "It is forbidden to climb the estrada" — 
that was a sign in the Bey's Palace — but it is 
not forbidden to visit the Souks, as the bazaars 
or native shops in Tunis are called. Ask any 
tourist what he remembers about Tunis and 
he will answer, *'The Souks." 

My mistress had good occasion to remember 
them, for it was mostly there she did her sketch- 
ing. The Mohammedans have an innate dis- 



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NATIVE STREET IN CONSTANII N E 



Mediterranean Idyls 



like to being painted or photographed, but a 
pencil, albeit a colored one, they have not be- 
come accustomed to. In that way she 
wheedled the Arab schoolmaster into letting 
her make a sketch of his school. The class- 
room was at the head of a flight of stairs lead- 
ing from the street ; the floor was covered with 
matting except for a space about three feet 
square at the top of the stairway, beyond which 
my mistress was not allowed to put her foot. 

Stretching across the whole back of the 
room was a divan, where the master sat, dressed 
in flowing robes and turban. The scholars 
were all little boys. They came clattering up 
the stairs, making much noise, took ofl* their 
brown hooded burnouses, and removed their 
shoes before stepping upon the matting. Be- 
neath their hoods, the children wore little red 
fezzes which they kept on throughout the les- 
son. Then each one picked up his own special 
slate or tablet on which was inscribed in beauti- 
ful flowing Arabic characters a verse from the 
Koran. When this verse Is thoroughly learned 
the slate is repainted a bluish gray all ready to 
receive a new verse. My mistress tried in vain 

123 



Mediterranean Idyls 



to wheedle the master into letting her handle 
one of these tablets — it evidently was too sac- 
red to be touched by profane hands. Even 
the English Professor who accompanied her 
was not allowed the privilege of examining 
one, much less handling it. Then, shouting at 
the tops of their voices, swaying their bodies 
back and forth, they would recite their lessons 
at the top of their little lungs. As no two of 
them were yelling the same thing, it was like 
Bedlam let loose. 

When I heard my mistress tell about it, I 
did not wonder she demoralized the whole 
school, and worried the schoolmaster almost 
out of his senses. All the children in the 
Souks would recognize her afterwards, and 
give her a right friendly smile. By dint of 
much effort she procured a similar tablet to 
those used in the school, and had it inscribed 
with an Arabic lesson. After that the diffi- 
culty was to get it translated. A friend of- 
fered to let one of his native servants do it but 
the language was too classic. Then she took 
it to one of the bazaars in Algiers. She has a 
mental picture of that episode, an apostle-like 

124i 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Arab seated at a table in the street, poring 
over the slate, muttering to himself in French 
"Oh! it is so beautiful, so beautiful." At last 
a translation into French was made. After 
that difficulty was overcome, came the still 
greater one of putting the French into poetical 
English. This is the result: 

"Oh little people! the promise of Allah is 
true. Do not let yourself be deceived by the 
life here below. The life here below is like 
the water which descends from heaven and re- 
vives the plants of the earth, which in turn 
nourish man. When the earth becomes beau- 
tiful man thinks himself all powerful. Then 
there comes an order from Allah during the 
day or night to make the earth dry; it is not 
enough for man to simply touch the earth to 
make things grow. This is the explanation of 
the words of God to those who reflect." 

I wonder what American children would 
think of a lesson like this. 

125 



Mediterranean Idyls 



Since our return to America I have often 
seen that wooden slate, and in imagination I 
am again in Tunis. I can see my mistress 
sketching in the Souks amid a babel of sounds ; 
the old marabout with his load of Bocarro rugs 
on his back; the fat Jewesses waddling along 
the streets. It is said the husbands fatten up 
their wives so as to keep them at home, and a 
wife has no value in his eyes till she has tipped 
the scales at at least two hundred pounds. 

Until we went to Tunis my mistress had al- 
ways thought of the word Bocarro as being the 
name of a rug but she found instead that it 
was the name of a man, or rather many men, 
for wherever she went in Tunis the card of 
"Bocarro Pere et Fils" was thrust in her face, 
into her pocket, or slipped into her hand. At 
last out of sheer desperation, some rugs were 
bought. After the usual haggling, and when 
she thought the price was all settled, an enor- 
mous tip was demanded for the marabout, or 
holy man, who seems to hang around every 
bazaar or Souk. This holy man took the rugs 
to the hotel on his back. It was funny to see 
him sneak through all the back streets, and into 

126 




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REET IX ]U)X SAAD-V 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the kitchen of the hotel, so the S. P. M. 
wouldn't see him and claim a portion of the 
pourboire. The little bell told me all about 
it and we had a good jingling laugh together. 

These marabouts seem to be quite an insti- 
tution in North Africa. My mistress had read 
a story about them in a recent number of Har- 
per's and she felt as if she could have added a 
few funny facts of her own. For instance, we 
motored to El Hamil, a little village grown 
up around a so-called university. This uni- 
versity was presided over by four marabouts, 
each marabout had four wives and, most thril- 
ling of all, they all lived together. The special 
purpose of the school is to teach the classical 
language of the Koran. 

My people were invited to drink coffee with 
the four marabouts. They went upstairs to 
a large, bare room, and solemnly sat around a 
huge table. Surreptitiously my mistress be- 
gan sketching one of them, but was soon found 
out. She was then informed that it was not 
etiquette to sketch that one — of course the 
most picturesque — ahead of the other, so she 
had to turn her attention to the master mara- 

127 



Mediterranean Idyls 



bout. After marking him off with a few lines, 
she again turned her attention to the more in- 
teresting marabout, but was again informed 
that after having sketched the most high and 
mighty, it was not etiquette to do a lesser one. 
Moreover he kept the sketch. 

Afterwards they gave the marabouts a ride 
in the automobile. I never in my life so 
longed for the power to turn my head around 
as I did at that moment. I could just imagine 
that sheet-and-pillow-case party going on in- 
side the car and I wanted to see it. I could 
hear their yells and frantic efforts to get out. 

Standing out there on the front of the auto- 
mobile in all kinds of weather, seeing all kinds 
of people, going through all sorts of country, 
I cannot help philosophizing a bit now and 
then. You see I am by myself so much. 
How strange it seems that this great gasoline 
product of the present age, the newest, most 
modern thing we have, should be the means of 
unveiling for us that which has been hidden for 
lo! these many years, not unveiling it for the 
few, but the many. Here were these mara- 
bouts, dwelling upon their heights, unvisited, 

128 



Mediterranean Idyls 



unseen, till the automobile pushed its way into 
their midst. Even the harem is no longer the 
secluded spot it formerly was. We motored 
to a tiny out-of-the-way place in the country, 
called Tibilis, so that my mistress could visit 
the harem of the Sheik. She was taken 
through a courtyard up a flight of stairs and 
into a chamber where she was introduced to 
one of his wives, rather a pretty girl with the 
usual dark, heavy eyes. The room was bare, 
containing only a metal bed and a small dress- 
ing table covered with cosmetics, so low the 
lady must have had to sit on the floor to see 
herself in the tiny mirror. But yes, there was 
one more object in the room, a phonograph 1 
I suppose the lady thought as long as she could 
not entertain her visitors by talking, not hav- 
ing any language in common, she would let 
the music talk. JMy mistress said it was funny 
to hear Sousa's band, French vaudeville and 
waltzes, away out in the solitudes of the African 
mountains, miles from any railway; and it was 
not until the disc entitled the ''Bey of Tunis" 
was put in, and she could hear again the music 
of tomtoms and the peculiar outcry of Al- 

129 



Mediterranean Idyls 



gerian dancers, that she realized where she 
was. Then a thought came to her : she would 
buy some of the records of native music. 

In Tunis she told the S. P. M. what she 
wanted. She put it in the simplest language 
possible, explaining that it was a round, flat, 
black thing about the size of a dinner plate. 
When she returned to the hotel that evening 
she found he had bought a whole phonograph 
with all its appurtenances! There was al- 
ready a huge typewriter in the automobile, and 
the thought of a phonograph was a straw too 
much. The S. P. M. was drawing five dollars 
a day for doing just such fool things. If my 
mistress sketched in a certain place in the 
Souks one day, and wished to return to the 
same spot the next, he never could find it. 

So many curious types were to be found in 
the Souks. One day she saw a man and a 
child working on the same garment. The 
man sewed, while the boy, standing about 
eight feet away, pulled taut on two strands of 
thread attached to the garment under the man's 
fingers, and, at each stitch, the boy threw the 
spools from one hand to the other. They were 

130 



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KL KANTARA, THE (.All.WAV OF -nil: DKSK 



Mediterranean Idyls 



embroidering a garment hand-woven of goat's 
hair. Of course everything native is made by 
hand, unless it is imported from Manchester 
or made in Germany. 

Oh, ye tourists, beware! 

I don't know what the natives would do 
without goats. The goats' hair as well as the 
camels' furnishes the thread from which they 
weave their garments. The skin makes their 
shoes, the milk gives them sustenance. We en- 
countered so many of these goats on the 
long journey to and from Algiers and Tunis. 
The only really wild animals we saw besides 
the Kabyle dogs were monkeys and once a 
little panther. It ran across our path while 
Frederico was stopping to repair the fan belt 
of the car. I was dreadfully frightened and I 
did hope my mistress would not wander far 
into the woods. However, as it was raining, 
she was not tempted to explore. In fact, it 
seems to me it was raining and cold most of 
the time, and I don't think my mistress ever 
began a sketch but that she was stopped by 
rain. Even in Biskra where it is not sup- 
posed to rain more than seven days out of 

131 



Mediterranean Idyls 



three hundred and sixty-five, we had three of 
them in a week. In Constantine it rained. 
In Timgad, where lie the magnificent ruins 
of an old Roman city, it sleeted. Nothing 
daunted, however, my mistress sketched be- 
tween drops the triumphal arch of Trajan, and 
other bits silhouetted against the mountains. 
For foreground there was always the paved 
street, the ruts of the chariot wheels still show- 
ing in the wide stone blocks. 

In my mistress' mind, the ruins of Timgad, 
in Algeria, grand as they are, do not approach 
in point of picturesqueness those of Dougga in 
Tunisia. She could have stayed in Dougga 
for days; that is, if the native children had 
not been so obstreperous. Usually no number 
of children would really bother her, but in 
Dougga, miles from anywhere, an autom.obile 
and a lady sketching were an irresistible com- 
bination, and constant cries of ''un sou, un 
sou' disturbed her very much. Before the 
days of automobiling these two cities were 
practically inaccessible to the average traveler, 
hidden away as they are behind the mountains. 

At home, when one thinks of North Africa 
132 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the mental picture is apt to be that of a desert. 
Even back in the days of the old Roman his- 
torian, Strabo, he refers to the desert, "spotted 
like a panther's hide." All the letters from 
America referred to our being in the hot, sandy 
desert, whereas only one glimpse of the real 
article did we obtain, and that was in the dis- 
tance and then it looked for all the world like 
a glimpse of blue sea out on the horizon line. 
Instead of hot deserts, we found mountains, 
sometimes covered with snow, sometimes tree- 
less rocky peaks, and always cold, so cold that a 
fire, no matter how much it smoked, was the 
first thing my people demanded on arriving 
at a place. And such a funny little fire it 
always was, made of roots that would only 
burn when kerosene was poured over them. 
Even I, out in the queer make-shift garages, 
could feel the cold and damp. Once a little 
pig slept all night on the running board of the 
automobile. I couldn't turn my head around 
to see him, but I could hear him snore, and in 
the morning Frederico had to wake him up. 

In the place of desert, we motored past im- 
mense vineyards and through dense forests; 

133 



Mediterranean Idyls 



many of these forests contained cork trees. 
What a wise provision of nature it is that in 
a country where so much wine is produced 
there should be found so much material for 
making corks! A forest of this description is 
not beautiful; the bark which is very thick is 
stripped up to a certain point, giving the trees 
an air of nakedness as to legs. Somehow they 
kept reminding m}^ mistress of the fairy story 
about the old peasant woman who fell asleep 
in the forest. While she was sleeping an ogre 
came along and chopped oiF her skirts up to the 
knee. When she awoke she did not recognize 
herself, and all the rest of her life she kept 
wandering through the world imploring every- 
one she met to tell her who she was. I felt so 
sorry for the poor trees. 

Most of the cork forests were on the road to 
Constantine. There is an old saying that "He 
who would hold Algeria must first take Con- 
stantine," and I can well believe it. The city 
is perched up on a high fortressed rock, seem- 
ingly as impregnable as Gibraltar, and is 
guarded by French officers with Arab soldiers. 
It is interesting to see a whole regiment march 

134 



Mediterranean Idyls 



by in their baggy trousers. My mistress 
bought a phonograph record of their marching 
music the "Corps de Chasse." All the 
African music is full of plaintive minor notes 
that seem to linger in one's memory and strike 
a responsive chord on my ringing sides. 

With its queer Jewish quarter and its steep 
up-and-down Arab streets, it is a strange med- 
ley of a town. My mistress christened the na- 
tive quarters "the blue city," for the whitewash 
with which its houses are spread is thoroughly 
mixed with indigo. The houses almost meet 
overhead, and storks have built nests on the 
roofs of many of them. It is considered un- 
lucky to remove these nests. While my mis- 
tress was sketching one of these streets the 
storks visited their nests, making a curious 
black and white silhouette against the sky. 
Close by was a Turkish bath for native women 
and children, which my mistress afterwards 
visited. Their dark bodies glistening in the 
steam, their shrieks of laughter, the jollity of 
the children, all combined to make a most 
curious Oriental scene. 

In Constantine, the veiled women dress in 
135 



Mediterranean Idyls 



black, whereas in Algiers they are always in 
white. 

There are only two classes of Arab women, 
those that are veiled, and those that dance. 
Most of the dancing girls come from the moun- 
tains in the far south. My mistress went to 
one of these dances in an out-of-the-way little 
town called Bon Saada which means "Place of 
Happiness." The hall in which the dance took 
place was about the shape of a bowling alley, 
long and narrow. Three rows of benches in 
tiers on each side were filled with Arab men 
done up in unbleached muslin, only the black 
eyes, and brows, and nose showing. The musi- 
cians played upon tomtoms at one end, the girls 
danced in at the other. This abdominal danc- 
ing has been described so often there is no 
need of going into particulars. Suffice it to 
say that the Arabs looked bored, and never 
seemed to take the slightest interest in the be- 
jeweled, painted, henna-stained young girls. 
It was not until an absolutely undecorated old 
hag came wiggling in that they seemed to take 
any notice. She was emaciated and looked 
like a dowdy Irish washerwoman, but the lit- 

136 






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GIRLS IN BISKRA 



Mediterranean Idyls 



tie bell told me she had never heard such ap- 
plause. All the Arabs woke up and appeared 
intensely interested. It seems she had just 
come from the mountains that night and was 
a very celebrated dancer. One mistake that 
people often make in describing these dances 
is not to refer to the fact that the girls are 
fully clad in long-sleeved, long-skirted, high- 
necked dresses. I saw a sketch that my 
mistress made of one of them, so know it for a 
fact. This sketch was made in Biskra. 

On the way to Biskra we motored through 
El Kantara which is called the Gateway of 
the Desert. Passing through this magnificent 
gorge we left cold, bleak winter and moun- 
tains behind, and emerged upon summer and 
sunshine, and flat, sandy stretches. In the 
sketch you will see this well defined. 

Biskra is the Beni Mora of "The Garden of 
Allah." My mistress was introduced to Safti 
who had been Robert Hichens' guide. He 
took her to the famous garden in which Domini 
spent so much time, and explained how he had 
given the author most of the data concerning 
that story. She saw the purple dog, only it 

137 



Mediterranean Idyls 



wasn't purple, but a violent blue, and made of 
china. On a divan in the little round smoking 
house devoted to the dog lay an Arab youth 
gracefully poised, playing on his flute. Of 
course it was not Larbi. They said Larbi was 
ill and in the hospital but that this was his 
brother. Strange how when one Arab dis- 
appears, his brother always crops up. The 
plaintive notes of the flute floated on the air to 
me as I waited outside and I remembered hear- 
ing my mistress say that the words of the song 
he sang haunted her. "Nobody but God and 
I know what is in my heart." 

Safti showed her his own home and intro- 
duced her to his family. The house was the 
usual dried mud hovel, although the owner has 
the reputation of being a rich man. My 
mistress asked him if it would be possible to get 
the Ouled Nail girl she had seen dancing the 
night before, to pose for her. Ouled means 
tribe, and most of these girls belong to this 
Nail tribe. He said it would be necessary to 
get the permission of a policeman, so a 
rendezvous was arranged in a street cafe. 
Safti, the girl, my mistress, her husband, and 

138 



Mediterranean Idyls 



the policeman all sat down to coffee. At first 
the girl was sullen and would not agree to any- 
thing, and it was not until the policeman had 
disappeared that she showed any signs of 
thawing. Finally a definite sum was settled 
upon and she consented to pose for an hour if 
my mistress would agree to meet her at a cer- 
tain corner, and chaperon her to and from the 
hotel. I myself was a httle bit disappointed, 
for I had heard some talk of taking her out in 
the automobile and getting her to pose in the 
desert, and I thought in that way I might have 
a good look at her. 

Rumors of the quantities of gold coins 
(Louis d'or) each worth four dollars, which she 
wore in chains suspended from the top of her 
head, and of her many silver bracelets and 
anklets, had reached me, and I took a good look 
at the picture when it was finished. 

All the Arabs in the hotel were on the qui 
Vive with curiosity, so my mistress showed 
them the sketch. They immediately recog- 
nized the girl and wrote her name, her father's 
and her mother's name, and the town from 
which she came. *'Halima bent (that is, 

139 



Mediterranean Idyls 



daughter of) Abdel Rahman." 

Afterwards she sketched the street of the 
Ouled Nails in which the girls live. 

As it rained hard that day, it was just as 
well they did not try to motor. One day we 
motored from Biskra to the picturesque little 
town of Chetma ; it is called the Venice of the 
Desert. A sketch was made there, also one of 
a Kabyle tent which we passed en route. 
These tents are made of lovely colored wools 
obtained from the long-suffering goat. The 
Kabyle people are the most primitive race in 
North Africa. They remind one somewhat of 
Esquimaux. If a Kabyle woman shakes hands 
with you, the proper thing is for you to imme- 
diately kiss your own hand. She does the 
same to hers. The children are called mocha- 
chos. The race is still the wandering nomad 
of the desert and to be fought shy of after 
dark or in a lonely place. My people were 
very fortunate in never encountering anything 
disagreeable, except weather, and once an al- 
most impassable road, but that was the 
S. P. M.'s fault. The patient man of our 
party did rise up then in his wrath and cursed 

140 



Mediterranean Idyls 



him in curses both loud and deep. 

Still, in looking back on the trip, my mistress 
says the S. P. JM. unconsciously supplied a 
note of comedy that perhaps but for him might 
have been lacking in the strenuous life that 
they lead, for strenuous it undoubtedly was, 
with its tough mountain climbing, sharp hair- 
pin curves, and long unbroken distances. Of 
course there was tire trouble; the chambers, as 
the S. P. M. called inner tubes, were constantly 
being punctured, but when friends who had no 
automobile told of their harrowing experiences 
in the "Blue 'Bus," my people felt as if their 
journey had been a joy forever. 

On returning we arrived in Algiers just in 
time for the Governor's ball, fit climax to a 
motor trip in North Africa. This ball is 
given for the natives, not the tourists. Sheiks, 
cai'ds, marabouts, all in gorgeous colors like 
a tale out of the Arabian Nights, were pres- 
ent. My mistress looked for her marabout, 
but could not find him. 

Of course I waited on the automobile outside 
and feasted my eyes on the beautiful garden 
with its clumps of colored electric lights grow- 

141 



Mediterranean Idyls 



ing like flowers out of the grass. The even- 
ing was balmy and soft like a hot summer night 
in July at home. The sirocco, which had 
been blowing for three days, drying up the 
roses and heating the blood of the people till 
they were cross and quarrelsome, had settled 
into a gentle zephyr. 

I was glad, for the morrow was to see me 
start on my homeward voyage and I did not 
like the thought of the Mediterranean in a 
heavy wind. People are apt to picture the 
Mediterranean as a land-locked summer lake, 
whereas my experience, as well as that of all to 
whom I have listened, is that it can be cold and 
rough and windy and it is only on shore that 
one can live the idylhc existence of warmth and 
summer skies. 

So farewell to Mediterranean lands ! I am 
still standing on the radiator of the automo- 
bile, but it is dark all around me, for I am 
packed tightly in a huge box down in the 
hold of the ship. Only the sound of the 
engine reaches me as it propels the vessel 
through the waves and my thoughts keep time 

142 



Mediterranean Idyls 



to its pulsations, thoughts that carry me back 
to North Africa, and I am already longing for 
the time to come when, with the tongue my 
mistress has promised to lend me, I may tell 
her my adventures. Perhaps some day — who 
knows — I may be allowed to accompany her 
once more and add another Idyl to her store. 



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